But parallel to this scarring from the past is a word which may have lost some of its shock power to us, but was one of dread for our ancestors: workhouse. 

Indeed, it is a grim feeling to find one’s ancestors living in such a place while combing through records.

Workhouses were set up in the 19th century as a way of providing relief for the poor or unemployed. They were actually founded prior to the Famine, and persisted long after it, though they perhaps are most associated with the legions fleeing starvation or landlessness even though many of the people who went there were not driven from the land at all but were simply misfortunates of circumstance.

Based on an English system of poor laws from 1834, parishes were grouped into unions, and each union was required to build a workhouse where the poor could be housed and given employment. The first Irish one was in Donegal in 1839 but many towns had them. The Cork Union workhouse was built in 1841 on Douglas Road with capacity for 2,600 inmates. 

Families were divided with men and women housed separately, and another separate section for children.

To put that in perspective, the Cork Union area, which included the city and out the harbour as far as Cobh and Monkstown as well as areas to the west of the city, had a population of about 158,000 in 1831. Once the Famine hit the workhouses were all well over capacity, a situation that seems to have persisted in Cork until the 1890s, when an inspector found the hospital areas at least to be overcrowded. The institutions remained a facet of Irish life until the early 20th century.

Inmates is a good word to describe these unfortunates. They performed manual labour such as breaking stones in exchange for food and board. Workhouses were designed to be grim places, with harsh conditions and poor sanitation, and there was little by way of human dignity. 

They were a place of last resort, and many of those who entered the workhouses were already suffering from malnutrition and disease. 

Many deaths were attributed to diseases such as cholera and typhus. Many unwed mothers found their way there.

Story gets personal

This is where the story gets personal for me. I, like many Irish people, have found relatives in the workhouse.

My great great granduncle Thomas Leonard was born in Cork Workhouse on May 16, 1879. He was the son of Hannah Hayes and Thomas Leonard… but my great great great grandfather Thomas Sr already had a family in Passage West, where he was a shoemaker and had his own shop, successful enough that his son Daniel followed him into the trade.

Thomas Sr was about 57 when Thomas Jr was born. He was still married to my great great great grandmother Mary Enright, who died on about August 1, 1879, from heart disease.

Thomas Jr’s birth record is clear that Thomas, a shoemaker from Passage West, was his father. The page with the registry has the records of other children born at the workhouse but, unlike the other women on that page, Hannah Hayes is the only one with “formerly” scratched out — she is the only unmarried mother on the page.

I’d like to tell you that they had a long and happy life together. I’d like to tell you that Thomas Jr formed some relationship with his father and went on to make something of his life with perhaps a family of his own.

Thomas Jr died on March 13, 1881, at Cork workhouse. He is listed as “servant’s child” and having died of debility after measles. Imagine a child’s whole life existing solely in a bleak, stone institution. Imagine a child suffering until death after becoming infected with a disease I have no doubt was connected to conditions in the workhouse. Imagine that his mother is not listed as present when he dies.

Hannah herself died at the workhouse around January 1, 1885, a spinster at the age of 40 listed as a servant at 7 Evergreen Street (the house still exists).

I have not been able to go through the workhouse records, so all I have that speaks to the existence of Hannah and Thomas Jr are those scant registrations of life and death.

I mentioned that the story was personal for me. And it’s not just because one of my little baby relatives was born and died there.

In 1922 or so, what had been a housing block became the South Cork County Home. The infirmary and hospital became redesignated as South Cork District Hospital.

In the 1960s, the whole institution became St Finbarr’s Hospital. In 1983, I was born there.

While the buildings where Thomas Jr lived and died were long gone, I would have passed the hospital dozens of times either on the bus or in a car while going to university or work in the city. Then it had the faint curiosity of being the place where I was born. Now it has the faint pang of sadness.

As a nation, we do not have a good track record in treating women and children well, especially in the eras of workhouses, mother and baby homes, and other such institutions. So, the next time I see the word “eviction”, I can only expect it to be followed by “workhouse” in my head. At least it will give me a chance to remember little Thomas. If I don’t remember him, who will?

• David O’Mahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor and a historian. Clodagh Finn is away.