‘Unhappy and Wretched Creatures’: Charity, Poor Relief and Pauper Removal in Britain and Ireland during the Great Famine*

Abstract

Abstract During the Great Famine (1845–51) hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees fled to Britain, escaping the hunger and disease afflicting their homeland. Many made new lives there, but others were subsequently shipped back to Ireland by poor law authorities under the laws of Settlement and Removal. This article explores the coping strategies of the Famine Irish in Britain, and the responses of poor law authorities to the inflow of refugees with a particular focus on their use of removal. We argue that British poor law unions in areas heavily affected by the refugee crisis adopted rigorous removal policies, and that the non-settled Irish were consequently deeply reluctant to apply for poor relief, doing so only when alternative sources of support were unavailable. Thus, the true scale of Irish hardship was hidden from the official record. The article also explores, for the first time, the experiences of those sent back to Ireland, a country suffering from the devastating effects of Famine. The combination of heavy Irish immigration to Britain and large-scale removals back to Ireland created distrust between the authorities at British and Irish port towns, as both sides felt aggrieved by the inflow of destitute Irish arriving on their shores. At the centre of all this were the Irish poor themselves. Uncertainty, dislocation and hardship were often their experience, and we argue that this endured long after the Famine had ended; that the events of the late 1840s, indeed, created a new reality for the Irish in Britain.