ABSTRACT

In April 1886 John Morley, recently appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, introduced a measure to relieve destitution in the west of Ireland caused by the failure of the potato crop. The Relief of Distress Act relaxed the provisions governing the distribution of outdoor relief and authorised grants up to a total of £20,000 to be made to six western Poor Law unions to supplement the resources of the Poor Law. The six boards of guardians — Belmullet, Clifden, Galway, Oughterard, Swinford and Westport — immediately set about putting the provisions of the act into operation, and the number of people receiving outdoor relief soared. Within five weeks the total number of recipients had jumped from under 2,000 to over 96,000. It was soon clear that far more than £20,000 was going to be expended by the boards and they were warned by the Local Government Board that any expenditure above the amount of the parliamentary grant would have to be met out of the rates. This led to a rapid reversal of the relief policy that had been adopted in the six unions and the summary removal of large numbers of people from the relief lists. Despite this attempt to limit the cost of relief, over £36,000 was spent administering outdoor relief in the scheduled unions during the late spring and early summer of 1886 of which only £19,400 was covered by grants under the act, thus leaving the boards facing considerable debts. An official inquiry into the administration of the Relief Act concluded that the manner in which relief had been distributed was both extravagant and careless. The guardians had made ‘no genuine effort … to restrict the relief to those who were properly entitled to it’, considering it unnecessary ‘to check the excessive relief so long as they anticipated that the cost would be borne … by the public funds’. 1