The new legislation parallels a system of social welfare introduced to Ireland almost 160 years ago by the British government on behalf of the Irish people. At that time, Britain – as a result of the Act of Union – was responsible for the government of Ireland. Today’s unionists aim to maintain this political link. Ireland’s welfare legislation followed years of debate about how the social welfare system should be changed. There was a general consensus that change was necessary, but how to achieve it was more difficult.

The debate was based on the premise that welfare was too expensive. It created a culture of dependency which was passed from one generation to another. State support perpetuated rather than eradicated this layer of society.

This viewpoint was given intellectual respectability by a variety of influential doctrines, especially political economy and utilitarianism. They advocated cheap, efficient government (a tax-payer’s ideal) with minimum intervention on social issues by the central State. Poverty was regarded as the fault of the individual and therefore to be punished rather than supported. Work, on the other hand, was viewed as both financially and morally improving.

In the early nineteenth century, the welfare debate in Ireland was shaped by perceptions of the causes of poverty and assumptions about the character of the Irish people.

Almost half of the population in Ireland in the 1840s existed on diet of potatoes, grown on small plots of rented land. This diet was highly nutritious and Irish people were the healthiest in Europe. Food, however, was used as a cultural benchmark and the potato eaters were looked down on in Britain. The fact that these people were also Catholic and Irish speakers, increased British conviction of their inferiority.

As potatoes were easy to grow, it was assumed that Irish peasants had plenty of time – which they spent smoking, drinking, plotting rebellion or producing more children. Ireland’s large population (over 8 million people compared with England’s 15 million) provoked the fear that the poor of Ireland would soon outnumber the hardworking people of England.

In Ireland in the 1840s – as in America today – the new welfare system was not only a means of alleviating poverty and hardship. It was intended to instil a work ethic into an allegedly lazy and feckless people. In both cases, the legislators ignored the fact that job markets are finite and there is not always a feasible alternative to welfare. Moreover, the creation of jobs and conditions of employment were of little concern to either government.

The British government’s solution 150 years ago was the introduction of a harsh new system of poor relief, based on workhouses. Workhouses – custom-built institutions – were the only mechanism through which assistance could be obtained. All relief was channelled through them and the poor could only obtain welfare by becoming resident.

Once inside the workhouses, families were separated, children being taken from their parents and husbands and wives placed in separate sections. Despite paying lip-service to the notion of family values, families were ruthlessly segregated to suit political convenience.

Workhouse diets were parsimonious and the daily regime was regulated by bells. Breaking a workhouse rule was harshly punished – sometimes even by imprisonment. Work was central to their ethos. All paupers were subject to this stringent regime – whether old, young, or sick. As today, it was the most vulnerable people in society who were penalised by a ruthless determination to punish poverty.

To ensure that the new system was efficient and cost-effective, there was a high level of local accountability and responsibility. This removed from the state (or federal government) moral and financial responsibility for looking after the poor. In Ireland, each locality was responsible for administering the welfare system and for raising taxes to pay for it. This placed an unequal burden on areas where welfare was already under-resourced. Areas with the least resources and highest levels of poverty had the highest financial burden. This made them particularly vulnerable in times of recession or, as occurred in Ireland, a failure of the potato crop.

Welfare cuts today in various parts of the world are also taking place in the context of unparalleled wealth. Again, reductions in welfare are punishing those who require most protection within society.

Failure of the Irish potato crop placed unprecedented pressure on the welfare system. At one stage, over three million people – almost half of the population – were dependant on welfare for survival. During the crisis, the British government continued to treat poverty as the fault of the individual: checks and controls were rigorously applied to ensure that the need for relief was genuine.

Throughout the Famine, the government remained opposed to giving free relief either in money or in food. Instead, it insisted that poor people should work on public works as a test of their destitution. This forced people who were already hungry and poorly clothed to undertake hard physical labour in order to earn money. The wage level set by government was so low that it was insufficient to purchase a minimal amount of food.

In the winter of 1846-47, many of the people employed on the public works, (which included women, children and the old) became sick and died. The British government refused to keep a record of mortality, but local police estimated that in the space of six months, half a million people died of famine or famine-related disease.

The failure of public works to save lives led government to open even more workhouses to deter people from applying for relief. The burden fell on local areas to meet the full costs of local relief. Paradoxically, the poorest areas carried the heaviest tax burden. In some areas, the system collapsed.

This policy demonstrated that Britain, which had forced through the Act of Union in 1800, had failed to accept financial responsibility for people who were legally part of the United Kingdom. For Irish nationalists, it exposed the shallowness of Ireland’s political union with Britain.

As policy continued to change, it was the poor who continued to suffer most. The imposition of local responsibility left the poorest areas in debt for many years, ensuring that the impact of the Famine continued long after the blight had left Ireland. This led to the high levels of emigration from Ireland in the late nineteenth century. By 1900, Ireland’s population had fallen to just over four million people.

Despite the suffering of the Irish during the Famine, many in the British government believed that the Famine had been beneficial for Ireland. It had simultaneously removed the poorest members of society from the land and the tax burden had broken the backs of some of the more bankrupt landlords. The social cost had been high for the Irish, yet the government (and a number of wealthy landlords) believed that Ireland would ultimately benefit from this.

The Famine was an outcome of the belief that poor people deserved to be treated harshly and with contempt. As starvation raged in Ireland, the framers of welfare legislation insisted that destitution had to be proved and relief earned.

Today’s welfare legislators have the same sanctimonious approach to the poor. Poverty is seen as being the fault of the individual – not the fault of a society which passes legislation designed to protect one section at the expense of the other.

Although the Famine was ‘over’ by 1852, its impact continued for many years. Levels of eviction, disease, death and emigration continued to be far higher than they had been prior to 1845. More importantly, the Famine left a legacy of bitterness and mistrust between Ireland and Britain. Today, 150 years later, this has not disappeared.

March 1, 1847. By the first post