Poverty, Children and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast, 1880-1918

In: Reappraisals in Irish History

Abstract

The late nineteenth-century city acted as a magnet for the poor of ruralIreland, attracting them with the promise of employment and economicindependence. For many, however, urban life meant economic precarity,marginalisation and destitution, with the workhouse as an all-too-presentreality. Young families were particularly vulnerable, with the result that thousandsof children found themselves confined within the workhouse walls.This book explores the changing role of the Irish poor law in childwelfare in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. Taking as itsfocus Belfast, a burgeoning industrial and port city at the heart of a globaltrade network and a city deeply divided along political and confessional lines,it examines the ways in which that city s poorest children and their families engagedwith the poor law and used the workhouse as part of their economy ofmakeshifts. It examines the various spaces of the poor law - whether theworkhouse, the foster home, or the far reaches of empire - as sites of encounterand engagement between welfare authorities and the city s poorest families, andexplores the development of child welfare practice at a time of increasingstate encroachment into the daily lives of poor children