AN IRISH WORKHOUSE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 376, 2 July 1880, Page 11

AN IRISH WORKHOUSE.

Bishop Gillooly. of Elphin, in a letter to Bishop O'Connell, of tGrass Valley, California, thus characterises the Irish woikhouse *yecem as follows :—": — " For many years past we have had. in this ill-fated aounti y a system of poor law relief; but a* your lordship may be oware, the man, and the family of the man, who occupies s) mu-h as ene-quarrer acie of land, be it in the bog or on the mountain side, in excluded from all relief under this law, either within or without the workhouse. The 'aw will allow him and hia family to starve, if he eloes not qualify himself for relief by giving up h.>use and land, and becoming an inmate of the woikhouse. Now, as over ninety percent, of those n'>w suffering or lapsing into destitution ar.- small landholelcrs, poor law relief for them would mean that they should give up for ever their poor but cherished homes ; and that they should break the sacred ties of f amity life, sepanting — as they should at the workhouse door — the husband from the wife, the puentfiom thechil Iren. It would mean, moreovc, that they cither should remain for life pining in idleness within their dreary, unhealthy prison, or, after leaving it, lead ever after the lives of helpless vagrants But no— our pure, warm-hearted peasants will not abandon the house they weie b<>ruiu; they will not separate from all they hold dear on earth ; they will cling to their homes and to each other till death, and starve rather rather than submit to that i.ihuman text of destitution. That text was really, though not of course avowedly, devised by the lunellor.i legislature in Lonelon for the cheap and easy wholesale eviction of the small tenant class, which it thoroughly effected in 1847. It is still maintained in the law, to the eternal disgrace of the English Government, for the same unhallowed purpose.