Poor Law

The Irish Poor Law system was the quintessential product of Victorian enthusiasm for administrative reform in Ireland. Over the nineteenth century it changed from being a safety net for the poor, to being a more complex early public health service.  Poor Law Unions were established under the Poor Law (Ireland) Act 1838 as a response to widespread poverty in Ireland. The country was divided into over one hundred poor law unions, each with a workhouse at its centre and was centrally controlled by the Poor Law Commissioners and later by the Local Government Board.

Boards of Guardians

The Board of Guardians was the governing body of the poor law union and the workhouse it contained.  In County Wicklow the Poor Law Unions were Rathdrum, Baltinglass and Shillelagh, and the county was also served by the bordering Unions of Naas and Rathdown.  The functions of the Board of Guardians were gradually extended to include public health, sanitation and rural housing, but the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 saw most of its public health functions taken over by the newly created Wicklow County Council. The board continued to administer the workhouse and its hospital, and to supervise some forms of outdoor relief, until its abolition in 1923.

Minute Books

The Shillelagh Board of Guardians were charged with administering the workhouse and the relief of the poor in the Poor Law Union of Shillelagh. These minute books are the proceedings of their weekly meetings including the Workhouse Master’s report, numbers admitted, clothing for the inmates, discipline inflicted, staff and provisions. The volumes are the largest series of poor law archives, reflecting not only the functions of the board, but also resolutions on internal and poor law matters and on wider political and social issues.  The minute books of the Boards of Guardians are a rich and informative resource for Irish social history and document an early system of welfare, public health and social services, providing detailed information on the day to day work of the Guardians, their employees, contractors and the people they served.

Note: The AI search-tool Transkribus has been applied to these records, so it is now possible to search both hand-written and typed documents by using the 'cntrl/f' keys.