Search Results for 'Poor Law'

One of the remedies in dealing with overcrowding, and rebellious behaviour from frustrated and angry women in the workhouses during the famine years, was assisted emigration. This was done on a massive scale. Between 1848 and 1850, 4,175 women were sent direct from the workhouse system to Australia. This was in addition to the thousands already sent away assisted by landlords and other schemes to clear the land of unproductive tenants. The only cost to the individual Poor Law unions was for new clothes, and travel expenses to Plymouth, from where the girls embarked to the colony. 

“The newly constituted County Hospitals and Dispensary Committee met for the first time on the 25th of February, 1922, in the boardroom of the old gate lodge of the old workhouse to organise the transfer of the Galway Hospital (Infirmary) on Prospect Hill to the workhouse site.” The hospital (which was where the county council buildings are today) had come under the control of the county council the previous year and it wisely decided that it should be closed and the workhouse developed as a central hospital to serve city and county. The Prospect Hill unit was phased out and ultimately closed in December 1924.

It is Christmas Day in the workhouse,

Many people will be familiar with the first line of this famous Victorian dramatic monologue, written by the English journalist George R Sims in 1879.

The ‘Night of The Big Wind’ on the night of January 6/7, 1839, deprived thousands of people in the Galway area of their homes. Their situation in the depths of winter was more than local charities could cope with. On May 8, the Galway Union was proclaimed to include the city and surrounding townlands to a radius of roughly 10 miles plus the Aran Islands, all of which would be served by a single workhouse in Galway. The first meeting of the Galway Board of Guardians was held in the Courthouse on July 3 of that year.

The Galway County Council has made the Gort Poor Law Union archive, with material dating from 1841 to 1921, available for the public to view on microfilm.