This work will be essential reading for social and political historians of nineteenth-century Ireland. It is the first academic study to explore the meanings of poverty, destitution and respectability in post-famine Ireland through the institution of the poor law, and is an original in content and interpretation. Previous works have focussed either on the relief system or on political developments. This book analyses poor law administration from a social and a political perspective. There is currently renewed interest in the English poor law of 1834, on which the Irish poor law was modelled. This book will provide historians of poverty and welfare, with an important comparative dimension

That ‘poor law was law’ is a fact that has slipped from the consciousness of historians of welfare in England and Wales, and in North America. Welfare's Forgotten Past remedies this situation by tracing the history of the legal right of the settled poor to relief when destitute. Poor law was not simply local custom, but consisted of legal rights, duties and obligations that went beyond social altruism. This legal ‘truth’ is, however, still ignored or rejected by some historians, and thus ‘lost’ to social welfare policy-makers. This forgetting or minimising of a legal, enforceable right to relief has not only led to a misunderstanding of welfare’s past; it has also contributed to the stigmatisation of poverty, and the emergence and persistence of the idea that its relief is a 'gift' from the state. Documenting the history and the effects of this forgetting, whilst also providing a ‘legal’ history of welfare, Lorie Charlesworth argues that it is timely for social policy-makers and reformists – in Britain, the United States and elsewhere – to reconsider an alternative welfare model, based on the more positive, legal aspects of welfare’s 400-year legal history.

Records of the Office of Public Works more than 30 years old have been transferred to the National Archives, Dublin. The types of public works records are described, then listed with call numbers.