The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book by Amy Hackney Blackwell

Author:Amy Hackney Blackwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2004-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

Workhouses

When people got truly desperate, there was a place that they could go: the workhouse. These houses had been established in the early 1840s to provide relief to the poorest people. Opponents of workhouses feared that the Irish would abuse the system, using the workhouse if they weren't truly desperate. But supporters countered that they could solve this problem by making workhouses so unpleasant that only people with no alternative would enter them.

Unpleasant they were. Anyone who owned land had to give it up before entering a workhouse, which forced many families to choose between staying on their farms and starving or giving up their land for a chance to eat. People who entered a workhouse were segregated by sex, which meant dividing up families. They were forced to live there, essentially sentencing themselves to prison. They had to give up their own clothes and wear pauper's uniforms, which marked them as destitute. They had to work at menial jobs to earn their keep — men broke up rocks, women knitted, and children either had lessons or learned to do various industrial tasks. Families only got together on Sundays.

The Irish people did everything they could to avoid the workhouse. They found the splitting up of families especially hard to bear. The unpleasant regimen did succeed in keeping people away from public charity in the early 1840s and even into 1846, before the second bad potato crop.

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