IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/acbsfi/v22y2012i3p227-248.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘Irish property should pay for Irish poverty’: accounting for the poor in pre-famine Ireland

Author

Listed:
  • Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh
  • Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh
  • Tom Tyson

Abstract

According to Walker [2004. Expense, social and moral control. Accounting and the administration of the old poor law in England and Wales. Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 23, no. 2: 85--127; 2008. Accounting, paper shadows and the stigmatised poor. Accounting, Organizations and Society 33, no. 4/5: 453--87] accounting contributed to the stigmatisation of the pauper and served to construct the social worlds of the old and new poor laws in England and Wales. Walker's encouragement of further research motivated the current examination of accounting for the poor in Ireland. The focus is on the early, pre-famine years of the Irish Poor Law, 1838--1845 -- a law whose context and content differed in several critical respects from that which prevailed in England and Wales. The study draws on data contained in the minute books of regular meetings of the Castlebar Union's Board of Governors, as well as from the Poor Law Commission's annual summary reports. Analysis of these materials suggests a context in which accounting neither constructed a social world nor stigmatised recipients of poor relief. It is argued that accounting is better viewed as contingent, reflecting the dynamics of a complex, divisive, and highly controversial undertaking -- governmental redistribution of wealth -- during a laissez-faire era when utilitarian and individualistic principles dominated discussions of political economy. From a broad perspective, accounting can be viewed as providing rationality and transparency to a social experiment that was encumbered with moral ambiguity and embedded conflicts of interest. More specifically, accounting texts contain the documentation required by an absentee administrative cadre to monitor expenditures, justify rates on Irish property, and ensure that procedures in the statute were carried out as specified.

Suggested Citation

  • Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh & Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh & Tom Tyson, 2012. "‘Irish property should pay for Irish poverty’: accounting for the poor in pre-famine Ireland," Accounting History Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(3), pages 227-248, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:acbsfi:v:22:y:2012:i:3:p:227-248
    DOI: 10.1080/21552851.2012.724911
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21552851.2012.724911
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/21552851.2012.724911?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2007. "Yardsticks for workhouses during the Great Famine," Working Papers 200708, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Martin Quinn & Desmond Gibney, 2018. "Accounting at an Irish maltster – the accounting practices of Bennetts of Ballinacurra in the 1920s and 1930s," Accounting History Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(1-2), pages 61-84, May.
    2. Lauwo, Sarah & Kyriacou, Orthodoxia & Julius Otusanya, Olatunde, 2020. "When sorry is not an option: CSR reporting and ‘face work’ in a stigmatised industry – A case study of Barrick (Acacia) gold mine in Tanzania," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    3. Graham, Cameron & Grisard, Claudine, 2019. "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief: Accounting and the stigma of poverty," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 32-51.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.

      More about this item

      Statistics

      Access and download statistics

      Corrections

      All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:acbsfi:v:22:y:2012:i:3:p:227-248. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

      If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

      If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

      If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

      For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RABF21 .

      Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

      IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.