From the Seventeenth Century to the Early Twentieth Century: the Emergence of Social Policy in Ireland

This chapter sketches the key features of the emergence of social policy in Ireland. This spans early state and charitable activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through to the more extensive social policy measures and provisions which emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before Ireland gained independence in 1921. The chapter documents the themes of care and social control which were intertwined in a mix of charitable and state provision during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Provision dealt primarily with the ‘problem of the poor’. During this period charitable efforts stand out, but only for categories of the ‘deserving poor’, principally children and the sick poor. State intervention was minimal, and strongly linked to the control and punishment of the ‘undeserving poor’. In the nineteenth century the establishment of the Poor Law continued the concern with poverty and social control, but within the context of a much larger institutional framework. The chapter also identifies the emergence of a more sustained debate about the nature of welfare by the end of the nineteenth century. This encompassed the idea that social policy and state intervention were matters that went beyond the problems of the poor, and resulted in recognition of the needs of some particular groups in the population, including children and older people.