The Limerick Workhouse tragedy, 1850

On this day in 1838 the Irish Poor Law Act was passed by the British government thereby facilitating the construction of workhouses across Ireland. In total, some 163 would be built over the next fifteen years (130 opened before the Great Famine).

Workhouses were often the place of last resort for people in desperate need and long into the 20th century there was a stigma attached to attending one or the subsequent county homes that many became.

Here the Irish Press ‘Window on the Past’ writer SJL, in 1979 recalled Limerick Workhouse at the tail end of the Famine and a terrible tragedy there in 1850:

LIMERICK Workhouse was still swollen with the influx caused by the Great Famine when on January 29, 1850 there occurred a tragedy which brought it to the notice of newspaper readers everywhere. Some sort of auxiliary workhouse had been provided in Clare Street where five hundred women were sleeping in lofts above a storage area. They had settled down for the night when, between eight and nine o'clock someone, apparently as a joke, raised a false fire alarm. The result was far from funny. As the unfortunate women crowded towards the ladder to reach the ground floor, panic took hold, the ladder broke, and bodies fell through the opening.

It was only a drop of ten feet but such was the panic above as the crowd pressed towards the opening that bodies continued to fall through on top of those below, suffocating those at the bottom of the heap. In a while they lay from floor to ceiling.

The Times of London described how "All remonstrances was unavailing to dissuade the paupers rushing headlong to ruin and before the surprising nerve and exertions of the matron, Mrs. Sloeman, and assistant-master, Mr O’'Shaughnessy, had effect, twenty-seven women were killed . . . and twenty-nine more dangerously bruised."

For more information search the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive which are brimming with information on the history of Irish workhouses (www.irishnewsarchives.com )