outdoor relief

outdoor relief, term used for poor relief given outside the workhouse. No provision was made for outdoor relief under the terms of the Poor Law Act of 1838, since it was feared that granting assistance without requiring recipients to submit to the rigours of the workhouse regime would swell the number of claimants and destroy the incentive to work. During the early years of the Famine a number of boards of guardians did provide additional relief, in the form of money and food, to assist the large numbers of people who could not be accommodated in workhouses. An amending act in 1847 permitted the granting of outdoor relief to certain specified groups, such as the sick and disabled, and widows with two or more legitimate children. The Poor Law Commission was also empowered to authorize the granting of outdoor relief to the able‐bodied during periods of ‘unusual distress’, to be provided wherever possible in the form of cooked food. Applications for relief were made to local relieving officers. Under a partial liberalization of outdoor relief provision in the later decades of the 19th century it became possible for the able‐bodied to receive financial assistance in cases of urgent necessity. In 1923 outdoor relief was replaced in the independent Irish state by home assistance, and relieving officers by assistance officers, though the procedure for obtaining relief remained fundamentally unaltered.

Virginia Crossman