An Irishman's Diary

A couple of years ago, a man visiting a house in a Dublin suburb was given a cheque for £1,000. This was no shady payment to a politician (though recent revelations make £1,000 seem like small bread indeed); rather, the money was a gift to the secretary of the Mendicity Institution, from a man, now making a successful career in Australia, who had used the services of the charity during a troubled period in his youth.

The "Mendicity" feeds over 100 people daily in its canteen on Island Street in the shadow of the Guinness brewery. No money is sought from diners, no questions are asked and no names are recorded.

Founded in 1818, the Mendicity's changing role over the years has reflected, in its own unique way, Dublin's development from times of wretched Dickensian woe to the boom times of today. In a recently published history of the charity, Dublin Outsiders (£11.99, A & A Farmer), Audrey Woods of UCD casts new light on the entire period. Although it is often a tale of great hardship and squalor, it is also one in which the single-mindedness of the institution's leaders shines through.

Unemployment

As Woods tells us, the charity was set up after a public meeting in the Mansion House in May 1817, at which a dramatic rise in begging on the streets was discussed. Jobs were scarce, as the demise of Grattan's parliament 17 years earlier had triggered an exodus of wealth from the city, and a rapidly increasing population made the unemployment situation even worse. The institution's first annual report in 1819 spoke of carriages and shops "beset by crowds of unfortunate and clamorous beggars, exhibiting misery and decrepitude in a variety of forms". In short, it said, "so distressing was the whole scene, and so intolerable was the nuisance, that its suppression became a matter of necessity."

Among others, members of the Bewley and Guinness families were involved in setting up the charity and the great Daniel O'Connell was a member of its committees. The aim was to prevent as well as suppress the "trade" of begging, so entry was restricted to those who were actually begging on the streets for a living. In keeping with the founders' belief that "labour civilises and moralises the human species", they devised a system whereby those admitted to the institution's premises on Hawkins Street worked for meals and a subsistence wage. It was hard work - jobs included pulverising oysters and breaking limestone - and the pay was pitched below the market rate to encourage people to take alternative employment outside. There was an emphasis on training, however, and many who learned trades in the charity found work easily when they left.

Children had to work too, but they also took school lessons. The elderly and "completely infirm" were given food, clothing and money for lodging - the institution did not provide accommodation. Daily attendance averaged 2,624 in 1818, although this was to fall in subsequent years.

Orphan list

Those in the institution frequently had nowhere else to go. The following case was by no means exceptional: "John and Robert Good, aged ten and five years respectively, whose parents were both dead, were admitted as orphans when brought in by their widowed aunt, Catherine. Robert died just over two years later. John eventually became apprenticed to a brazier in Cuffe Street. When that man's business failed, John went to work elsewhere for a time, but was finally readmitted to the orphan list in 1836, aged 16."

Woods tells how the institution had to move from its original home in the Dublin Society (later the RDS) building on Hawkins Street to make way for the Theatre Royal, which opened there in January 1821. Between 1820 and 1824, a temporary base was established on Copper Alley, off Fishamble Street, but its most prominent home, from 1824 until the 1950s, was Moira House on Usher's Island.

From its earliest days, the Mendicity stressed "the necessity of providing for the future by the practice of . . . frugality and sobriety" and encouraged regular saving. It also set up a dispensary, which proved especially useful during the Famine years, when fever and disease were rampant and when resources were severely stretched.

Public baths

In 1852, after a substantial fund-raising drive, the institution opened the first public baths in Dublin. These became very popular with the city's working classes and poor. The attention to detail was meticulous. There were separate entrances for male and female bathers; clothes-washing facilities were available and tickets could be bought in order that "fitting objects" could have a wash. The baths did not close until 1909, by which stage the service had petered out through lack of demand.

Woods also tells of a "transmission service", through which the institution enabled people from outside Dublin who had fallen on hard times to return home. The overall impression from her illuminating account is of a consistent effort by the charity not only to meet the immediate needs of the desperately poor, but to seek to give them the means to transform their lives. Ahead of its time in many ways, this was in marked contrast to a plan, referred to by Woods, in which one Arthur Dobbs, a surveyor-general of Dublin in the early 1700s, sought to address the problem of poverty in the city. He envisaged workhouses in which persistent idlers would be confined to a pumphouse, where, chained by the foot, they would pump or be drowned. Thankfully, his plans never materialised.