Ennis Workhouse 1930 - 1940

[monty]

Can anybody tell me how I go about finding out / or confirm
if a relative of mine ended up in this awful place ?

I think the period must be somewhere between 1930 - 1940

I am what I am because.........

good luck - Monty

[Paddy Casey]

Monty,
Whilst the Ennis workhouse building still existed in the 1930s it was being used for newly designated public health facilities which were set up by the government of the new Republic in the early 1920s (see http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1923/en/ ... gen_1.html ) and was no longer a workhouse in the legal or organisational sense. Having said that, some of the functions listed in the latter act sound like some of the old workhouse functions under another name.

Peter Beirne of the Clare Library Local Studies Centre in Ennis tells me that people thought to have been in such an institution in the 1930s or the 1940s could well have been in the County Home and under the care of the Board of Health and Public Assistance, then part of Clare County Council. The County Home was often the final home of the destitute, the sick and aged poor of the county. In a 1940 council meeting on conditions in the County Home, Councillor Michael McMahon stated: "The County Home in Ennis is anything but a home, and in my opinion if poor people had the choice when their time arrived between the County Home and the grave, they would choose the grave." The County Home is in Lifford and is now St Joseph's Hospital.

Conditions did improve with the building of the new County Hospital in Ennis which opened in October 1940. It was partly built with funds from the Irish Sweepstake.

Persons who were mentally ill would have been in Our Lady's Hospital on the Galway Road (1868 - 2002). This building, a listed building, is currently unoccupied.

The minute books of the Board of Health and Public Assistance (1915 - 1942) along with the manager's orders relating to the Board's work (1934 - 1966) are available through Clare County Archives, http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/archiv ... _index.htm as are the records of Our Lady's Hospital.

Paddy

[monty]

Hello Paddy

Thanks for letting me know the history of this place around these dates.

Have you ever considered going on MASTERMIND ?

appreciate your help.

good luck - monty

[Paddy Casey]

I did think of competing, Monty, but I would need to update my general knowledge in some of the areas most likely to generate questions in Mastermind. I'm thinking of areas that we all get a bit rusty on such as the energy radiation equations of the pi-meson during decay in high magnetic fields, or the folio fragments now tentatively ascribed to the early medieval romantic poet Giancarlo diBattista of Siena, or the Tipperary junior hurling teams and results from 1895-1905. Not to mention everyday stuff such as the elements of the periodic table with their atomic weights and the causes of, and participants in, each of the three phases of the Peloponnesian wars.

It's just finding the time, just finding the time.

Paddy