1923

Closing the workhouse

In the years to come the historian will read the first annual report of the County Galway Board of Health with interest. For the neat booklet that has just been issued records the opening of a new chapter in Irish local government.

The brief “summary of proceedings” tells the story of a change that was linked up with the most adventurous period that any generation of Irishmen had known – a period when the last remnants of the Famine Years were banished forever.

The change was really the prelude to the greater change in national government. The booklet has a distinction from the fact that President Cosgrave, who, as Minister for Local Government was responsible for the order, “Abolish the Unions”, contributes a foreword in Irish, of which the following is the translation:

“It has been well and truly said that kindly care for the poor is the best sign of true civilisation, and, again, that the condition of a nation’s poor indicates the character of the national mind. With the coming of freedom the people of County Galway were quick to realise that, at last, it was in their power to end for ever the contemptuous treatment of the poor resulting from the workhouse system, and they set about inaugurating a new system with energy and zeal.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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