Ciarán McCabe has written an insightful account of begging, charity and religion in pre-Famine Ireland. Containing seven chapters, a substantial introduction and extensive bibliography, the author has engaged with a rich variety of primary sources that offer fresh perspectives on poverty, charity, religious responses and attitudes in the early nineteenth century, highlighting the similarities and differences between various social groups that go beyond the 1838 Poor Law Act and giving voice to the poor, who previously tended to have walk-on parts in the historiography of pre-Famine Ireland.

The collapse of cottage industries in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars saw the formerly industrious poor resort to begging. The politicisation of poverty in Ireland saw various denominations develop distinct approaches and attitudes towards poverty with the concept of virtuous poverty seen to be important and a hierarchy of merit among the poor, though religious sentiment appeared to colour acts of charity. McCabe stresses the importance of social class, gender, rural and urban ideas around alms-giving as well as religion, and poses the question as to whether there were actually different interpretations of poverty between religious denominations. The Whatley Commission into poverty offered great insight, coming in at a whopping 5,000 pages that contained unparalleled information on social and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland. Contemporaries remarked that vagrants and beggars were beyond enumeration because there were so many. The government tried but struggled properly to come to terms with poverty and chronicles of Ireland in the nineteenth century commented upon the ubiquity of poverty.

McCabe examines the changing use of the terms beggar and mendicant, while aware of the importance of finding appropriate definitions and nomenclature. The dubious nature of vagrancy laws meant that authorities could use the ambiguity of these terms to their advantage. McCabe argues that arrests have often been used to measure the levels of begging and vagrancy but this is problematic and inadequate in measuring mendicancy. Statistics gathered were largely impressionistic and McCabe has stated that the large-scale mobility of the poor was always a challenge in measuring poverty as mendicants were mobile strangers that engaged in face-to-face interactions.

There were also benevolent and sympathetic views that tended to be wrapped up in the unctuous language of paternalism. Contemporaries stated that a lot of poverty was hidden and there were social and moral obligations in giving alms. Vagrants’ visibility shocked people and their visceral state particularly concerned wealthy people. The Dublin Mendicity Institution paraded the poor and beggars through the streets when times were bad in order to both remind and shame the wealthy. These institutions were seen by the commercial classes as a good way of controlling and removing beggars from public view. Furthermore, the harsh treatment of vagrants and beggars was a form of self-defence that appealed to middle class senses of respectability that also allowed for the demonisation of the lumpenproletariat.

Both Catholic and Protestant interpretations of philanthropy focused upon an active and living faith. McCabe shows that there were really very few differences between Catholic and Protestant distribution of relief – the same compassion, perspectives, biases and discrimination was on display. There was an ultra-Protestant belief that Catholics were indiscriminate in their alms-giving that stemmed from religious tensions during the 1810s, and the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the 1822 famine. The better-off classes saw alms-giving to be a sacred duty to the poor, though there were those that believed there were deserving and undeserving across the religious denominations. There was inter-religious cooperation in the relief of the poor and this was particularly important outside of cities where it was hoped that intimate local knowledge possessed by the clergy would ensure more effective distribution of relief.

McCabe gives us very useful information and insights into the origins and operations of various homes for the poor prior to the establishment of the workhouse system. This ad hoc form was inspired by similar processes of relief elsewhere in Britain and Europe, and this book is excellent in drawing upon such examples and giving a good European overview while also looking at regional patterns of relief. Crucially, McCabe argues ‘the poor exerted agency and made decisions for themselves, drawing on their knowledge of the various welfare options available to them in the “economy of makeshifts”’ (p. 165). The reader is presented with multiple vernacular perspectives of poverty of both men and women that ensures a richly variegated account of poverty in pre-Famine Ireland.