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Poverty and Welfare in Ireland c.1833-1948

Elderly Inmates of the Belfast Union Workhouse ca 1905
Elderly Inmates of the Belfast Union Workhouse ca 1905

A conference sponsored by the ESRC and the Royal Historical Society and hosted by QUB and Oxford Brookes University

Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast

Friday 26 – Saturday 27 June 2009

 

This conference, which incorporates a Royal Historical Society regional symposium on Irish welfare history,  will bring together a number of leading and emerging scholars currently researching different aspects of the history of welfare and poverty in modern Ireland, to exchange research findings and discuss agendas for future research. The chronological framework for the conference will be roughly the lifespan of the Irish poor law, from the initiation of the Whately inquiry into Irish poverty and its relief in 1833, through the establishment of the poor law in 1838, to its abolition in the Irish Free State after 1922 and in Northern Ireland in 1948.

Themes to be addressed include the physical structure and legacy of the Irish workhouses; political and administrative responses to poverty and its relief; the impact of the Great Famine; child welfare; medical relief, the medical profession and the Irish hospitals; voluntary philanthropy and state welfare; and welfare regimes in the Irish successor states after 1922.

The conference is supported by the ESRC-funded project ‘Welfare Regimes under the Irish Poor Law, 1850-1922’ and will include presentations by the project research assistants and investigators, based at Oxford Brookes and Queen’s Universities.

Plenary speakers include Dr Larry Geary (UCC) on medical relief and the poor law in the ninetenth century, and Mr Peter Higginbotham, on his project to identify and record the sites and physical remnants of all 163 Irish workhouses.

 

Update: A volume of essays drawn from this conference has been published as Virginia Crossman and Peter Gray (eds), Poverty and Welfare in Ireland c. 1838-1948 (Irish Academic Press, 2011).

 

 

 

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME (Word doc)

Registration for the conference is available here. Registration page.

Information on Accommodation is available here. Accommodation near QUB. [pdf file]

Travel information is available here. QUB Travel Page.

 

For further information, contact:

Dr Olwen Purdue or Prof Peter Gray
School of History and Anthropology
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast BT7 1NN
N. Ireland
Email: povertyconference@qub.ac.uk

 

 

Conference Programme