Introduction

In his 1737 tract on the need to badge ‘foreign beggars’ in Dublin city, Jonathan Swift betrayed a surprising ignorance of the role of Irish parishes in assisting the poor and curtailing mendicancy. Swift incorrectly asserted that in Ireland, as in England, ‘every Parish is [legally] bound to maintain its own Poor’. His mistake lay in the fact that whereas in England Elizabethan Poor Laws had identified the parish as the institutional driving force for the implementation of the statutory Poor Law system, one in which the poor were conferred with an entitlement to support from their native parish, Irish parishes possessed no such significance. While a mid-seventeenth-century act bestowed powers on a Dublin parish to levy a rate to support a localised poor scheme, Irish parishes on a nationwide level were devoid of any critical legal standing in this respect. His inaccuracy notwithstanding, Swift's intervention in the ongoing Poor Law debates of the 1720s and 1730s reflects the reality that the parish stood at the centre of corporate efforts to relieve ‘deserving’ distress and punish ‘undeserving’ idleness.

An assembly of male householders in a given parish, which met at least once a year – typically Easter Monday or Tuesday – to levy a local rate (cess) on parishioners to fund the provision of ecclesiastical and civil services within the parish, the vestry was, from the mid-seventeenth century, a unit of local government, overseeing road maintenance, fire-fighting, public lighting and street cleaning. The extent to which the vestry exerted those civil functions varied from place to place, with vestries in Ulster and in large urban centres being most active as it was in these locations that there was a greater concentration of members of the Established Church. Many corporate bodies had their roles to play in responding to beggary and poverty: municipal authorities, the central state, the charitable sector and the various churches and religious societies. Parish vestries constitute a particularly interesting case, not only given their relative historiographical neglect, at least regarding their nineteenth-century incarnations, but also because of the technical complexities inherent in the nature of their association. Parish vestries exerted ecclesiastical functions according to their status within the Established Church. But, they also carried out civil duties, such as suppressing street begging and relieving poverty, the operation of which were approved at meetings open to parishioners of all denominations.