Disease and Destitution in Urban Ireland, 1850–98

Following the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1800 in Dublin, the city fell into a decline which produced some of the worst slum areas in Western Europe. After a sharp drop during the 1840s, the Irish population settled into chronic decline. However, the city of Dublin experienced this decline for a shorter period, and to a lesser extent than the country as whole. As the Dublin population increased, so too did the admissions to the workhouse, suggesting that rising population and poverty were in some way linked. This local picture is challenged by the national figures which illustrate that the proportion of sick admissions was decreasing. Nationally, the Poor Law system was supporting an increasingly healthy population in the workhouses, but locally, in the country’s chief urban centre, this trend was reversed.
Despite the continued diversification of the Poor Law System, and the provision of state-sponsored health care under the Medical Charities Act of 1851, the institutions of the Poor Law in urban Ireland were largely supporting a group of people who were either too ill or too old to work resulting from an unhealthy urban environment, which was anathema to anti-modernists and which fed the nationalist agenda of a rural, agriculturally based independent nation-state. This paper will explore the social cost of disease and poor health, and the relationship between poverty and illness, in one of the most deprived urban centres in Europe between 1850 and 1898; as well as looking at those who were most vulnerable to destitution in urban Ireland, it will provide comparative analysis with urban experiences throughout Western Europe.