Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History (47 page)

Poor Law
. Poor law was the means by which the poor and destitute were to be relieved of distress. Extended to Ireland in 1838 (1 & 2 Vict., c. 56) and modelled on the English Poor Law Act of 1834, poor law was financed by local poor rates that were levied on occupiers of land valued at four pounds and over. The intention was to save money by doing away with
outdoor relief
and the provision of public works for the unemployed during periods of hardship. Administratively, the country was divided into
poor law unions
, each of which was supervised by a board of
guardians
under the overall direction of a poor law commission. Relief was discretionary and not a right and was to be offered only in the workhouse under the principle of less eligibility (that is, people would only elect to go there as a last resort). Conditions were to be kept so bleak that only the completely destitute would enter. It was utterly inadequate for Ireland where poverty was widespread in rural areas and where admission to a workhouse required families to surrender the holdings on which they depended for subsistence. The poor law system failed to meet the challenge presented by the Great Famine and government was compelled to provide outdoor relief again. In 1847, in an attempt to make responsibility for distress a local rather than a British charge, the
Poor Law Commission
was made autonomous of the Poor Law Board in England, the very weak and the disabled became entitled as of right to relief but tests of destitution were more rigorously enforced. Significantly, outdoor relief was provided for the first time under poor law. Local dispensaries and public health regulations came within the ambit of poor law after the famine and when the supervisory Poor Law Commission was abolished in 1872 its functions were absorbed by the Local Government Board.
See
Malthus, rate-in-aid, relieving officer, workhouse test. (O'Brien, ‘The establishment of poor-law unions', pp. 97–120.)

Poor Law Commission
. A government-appointed body set up in 1847 (10 & 11 Vict., c. 90) to assume responsibility for the administration of
poor law
in Ireland, a function previously exercised by the English poor law commissioners. The poor law commission exercised a supervisory jurisdiction over local poor law boards. In 1872 (35 & 36 Vict., c. 69) it was merged with the Local Government Board which had been established a year earlier and which, in time, became one of the most important departments in the Irish administration. Both the Poor Law Commission and the Local Government Board comprised the chief-secretary, under-secretary, commissioners, regional inspectors and clerks. In addition to supervising poor law (including a veto over the appointment of and power to dismiss salaried poor law union officials and to summarily dismiss and replace elected boards of guardians), the Local Government Board was responsible for the dispensary system, for organising relief in distressed areas during famine, it arbitrated between rival local authorities and arranged for the transfer of power to the county and rural district councils created by the 1898
Local Government Act
. After 1898 the board (which was stuffed with unionists and Protestants) was able to limit the freedom of action of the newly-created (largely nationalist and Catholic) councils because its approval was necessary for their acts. The Local Government Board supervised hospitals established under the 1908 Tuberculosis Prevention (Ireland) Act and the distress committees set up under the Unemployed Workmen's Act (1905). Under the 1908 Old Age Pension Act it became the central pension authority.

poor law union
. An administrative area in which ratepayers were assessed for the poor law rate, the poor law union was created by the extension to Ireland in 1838 (1 & 2 Vict., c. 56) of the English Poor Law Act of 1834. The area of each union was determined usually by taking the chief market town in an area and attaching to it, without regard to county or baronial boundaries, the surrounding land within a radius of about 10 miles. The only limit imposed was that no townland should be divided. Townlands were then grouped together in electoral divisions for the purpose of electing union officials known as guardians. The poor law union assumed responsibility for tasks previously mandated to the
grand jury
including the maintenance and support of dispensaries, fever hospitals and workhouses but not its judicial function. Each union was administered by a
board of guardians
, partly comprising
ex-officio
members such as magistrates and partly elected officials. In all a total of 163 poor law unions were eventually established, each with its own workhouse. (O'Brien, ‘The establishment of poor-law unions', pp. 97–120.)

poor rate
. A tax levied on every
tenement
to provide relief to the poor in each of the 130 (163 by 1848)
poor law unions
that had been established by the extension of
poor law
to Ireland in 1838 (1 & 2 Vict., c. 56). Under the 1851 Medical Charities Act poor rate revenue was also used to fund a nationwide dispensary network. The
grand jury
was nominated to carry out a valuation of all tenements within its jurisdiction for the purpose of assessing liability and the
board of guardians
in each union employed valuators to conduct the valuation and to record their findings. The imposition of the poor rate met with opposition in some areas, mainly in the west. In 1843–4 police or military intervention was required in 21 unions to enforce collection. To avoid a repetition, occupiers of property rated at less than £4 per annum were exempted (6 & 7 Vict., c. 92, 1843) and their portion of the rates was assigned to the landlord. This concession boomeranged on tenants during the Great Famine years. Declining rental payments from stricken tenants coupled with increasing poor law taxation stimulated landlords whose properties were heavily subdivided into units valued below £4 to clear their estates, consolidate and convert to pastoral farming. The poor rate valuation, itself, was also a source of friction. Many ratepayers claimed the valuators were unskilled in valuation and had undervalued the holdings of their cronies, the large landowners. This difficulty was overcome by the establishment in 1852 of
Griffith's Valuation
, a single uniform system of land and tenement valuation. From 1898, with the passage of the
Local Government (Ireland) Act
, the responsibility for levying the rate devolved to the county council and in 1946 the poor rate was renamed the country rate.
See
rate-in-aid, ‘quarter acre clause'. (Kinealy,
This great calamity
.)

Popery, Report on the State of
(1731). In 1731 the Irish house of lords, at the instigation of Archbishop Boulter, appointed a committee to investigate the state of popery in Ireland. Basing its findings on returns submitted by Protestant clergymen, sheriffs and magistrates in the localities, the committee reported that there were 892 regular mass-houses and 54 private chapels served by 1,445 priests, 51 friaries with a total complement of 254 friars, 9 nunneries and about 549 popish schools operating in Ireland. It claimed that 229 mass-houses had been constructed since the death of George I and that papists were openly attending mass. The original returns were destroyed in the Public Record Office in 1922 but the report had already been published in the first four volumes of
Archivium Hibernicum
(1912–15) and in the
Journal of the house of commons of the kingdom of Ireland
, iii (Dublin, 1727– 52).

popish plot
.
See
Titus Oates.

portal dolmen
. A
neolithic
, single-chambered tomb distinguished by tall upright portal or entrance stones, a lower backstone and a large capstone. Some portal dolmens can be found at the end of long cairns and others were elaborated to accommodate small burial chambers in the sides of the cairn. Thus they are are related to court cairns. There are about 150 examples of portal dolmens in Ireland where they occur mostly in Ulster.

portcorn
. A rent in kind, usually of corn (wheat,
bere
, malt and oatmeal), owed by tenants to monasteries and abbeys. After the monastic
dissolution
port-corn rents were reserved to the crown and granted to the lord lieutenant, master of the rolls, lord chief justice and the presidents of Munster and Connacht. Tenants were allowed offset the value of these renders against their crown rents. (Simington,
The Civil Survey
, pp. xxviii–xxxi.)

portion
. A settlement created for the benefit of the offspring of a deceased landlord that was payable when they attained
majority
or upon their marriage. It was usually raised by a mortgage on the property or
rentcharge
.

portioner
. A tenant-farmer who paid a fixed portion of his produce to the landlord in lieu of a money payment.

portionary
. Where the income of a medieval cathedral was divided in fixed proportions between a fixed number of dignitaries, the canons were known as portionaries.

portreeve (portrieve)
. Synonymous with mayor or sovereign, the chief officer of a municipal corporation and enforcer of town regulations.

posse comitatus
. (L., the power of the county) The power possessed by the sheriff to summon all men above the age of fifteen to attend and assist in executing the process of the law or perform other acts in maintaining the law.

postea
. (L., afterwards) A record of the proceedings and verdict of a trial.

postern
. 1: Any gate or door in the wall of a castle or fortification other than the main entrance 2: A sallyport or escape route.

post-house
. A house along the post routes where horses were changed.

potato ground
. A ready-manured field leased for a one-year term to cottiers to grow potatoes.
See
conacre.

potwalloper
. A pejorative term used to describe a person invited to reside in a ‘potwalloping'
borough
shortly before a parliamentary election to vote as the resident magnate required. It derived from the requirement that, in addition to a residency of six months (one year from 1782), all electors must have a family and have cooked a meal within the borough precinct to qualify for the franchise. Until 1793, when the franchise was extended to include Catholics, voting rights were restricted to Protestant five-pound householders. There were 12 ‘potwalloping' boroughs in Ireland (Swords, Knocktopher, Rathcormack, Dungarvan, Lismore, Baltimore, Antrim town, Lisburn, Randalstown, Tallow, Newry and Downpatrick) only four of which (Newry, Downpatrick, Lisburn and Dungarvan) survived the
Act of Union
.

pottle pot
. A two-quart pot or tankard.

poundage
. 1: Any payment of so much per pound upon the cost of any monetary transaction 2: A duty on imports and exports of so much per pound, usually of the order of 12
d
., originally granted to the crown for defence purposes. In Ireland in the the late fifteenth century, it was the custom of 12 pence in the pound levied on imports and exports to finance a small permanent standing force known as the
Brotherhood of Arms of St George
.
See
tonnage 3: The right to impound wandering cattle. The levy paid to retrieve impounded animals was known as poundaging.

Powis Commission
. A royal commission appointed in 1868 to investigate the national system of primary education and to make recommendations for reform. The commission was chaired by the earl of Powis and comprised 14 members, seven Catholics and seven Protestants (including two Presbyterians). Reporting in 1870, the commission felt that the academic progress of schoolchildren had been much less than it ought to have been and recommended the introduction of a system of
payment-by-results
whereby a portion of a teacher's salary would be determined by the performance of each child under examination and a satisfactory level of attendance. They proposed a measure of compulsory attendance for those children in towns who were not actually at work, the abolition of model schools, the ending of the distinction between convent schools and national schools in the matter of state subvention and the ending of the controversial involvement of the Commissioners of National Education in editing schoolbooks. Local areas, according to the commission, should contribute one-third of the state grant to schools or have it rated locally. Finally, it proposed that schools should be permitted to become denominational in areas where two schools, one Protestant, one Catholic, had been in existence for three years and where the average attendance of each was at least 25. These schools were to be free of religious regulation beyond permitting the withdrawal from religious education classes of children of the minority religion. In effect, the commission was proposing to licence denominational schooling in the very areas where conditions were propitious for mixed schooling, thereby destroying the founding principle of the system. In reality this had no bearing on the
de facto
situation as the system had already hardened into a denominational one. The recommendations of the Powis Commission were partially implemented but not with any great success. Payment-by-results increased school attendance but also introduced a mechanical rote-learning approach that was discontinued within a few decades. The National School Teachers (Irl.) Act (1875) introduced a complex mechanism for increasing local contributions but that too was a failure. A partial compulsory education bill was passed in 1892 but it applied only to towns and made allowances for children to help with farming and fishing. The eight-volume Powis report contains the commission's report, minutes and analysis of evidence and special reports on model, training and agricultural schools. The sixth volume contains a national educational census showing the number of pupils actually present in each primary school on 25 June 1868.
See
Belmore Commission and Education, National System of. (Powis; Coolahan,
Irish education
, pp. 24–33.)