The British Parliamentary papers remain a surprisingly under-utilised resource. Despite, or perhaps because, of the sheer amount of information available within their pages, historians of nineteenth-century Ireland have tended to draw on this material selectively, mining the myriad reports and inquiries for colourful quotations to illustrate or corroborate a particular point. Evidence from a committee or inquiry is rarely examined in its entirety, or subjected to systematic analysis. Niall Ó Ciosáin’s study of the poor inquiry commission is, therefore, greatly to be welcomed. The book brings together his research on the 1833–36 royal commission chaired by the archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately. The commission was established to inquire into the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland, and make recommendations regarding the best mode of relieving them. Some of this has already appeared in book chapters and journal articles, some is new. The result is a fascinating study that examines the operation of the inquiry from its inception to its conclusion and aftermath. There is a brief explanation of the background and wider context of the commission, but discussion focuses primarily on its mode of operation, the evidence collected, and what this can tell us about perceptions of poverty in early nineteenth-century Ireland.

It is a pleasure to read a book by someone so totally in command of their source material. Consequently, Ó Ciosáin has much to say that is both informative and enlightening. He is particularly interesting on the oral evidence taken by the inquiry. While many committees and inquiries questioned witnesses and recorded their answers, the poor inquiry was unusual in sending assistant commissioners around the country to hold open sessions. Local people were gathered together and asked their opinion on different topics rather than being questioned separately, or in any particular order. The resulting evidence, Ó Ciosáin claims, constituted a ‘massive survey of opinion’ unique not only in scale but also in the insight provided into popular attitudes and oral culture at a particular juncture in nineteenth-century Ireland. Separate chapters are devoted to particular aspects of the inquiry, for instance, the evidence taken on vagrancy and begging which reveals popular attitudes to have been much more tolerant of both vagrants and beggars than either government or the law, and the attitudes and involvement of the Catholic church. The views of Catholic clerics were particularly canvassed and proved in many respects much closer to official than popular opinion.

Some readers will be disappointed by the narrow focus adopted throughout the book. We learn a tremendous amount about the inquiry but very little about the political context to it. There is no discussion of the views of the chairman of the inquiry, Archbishop Whately, or his aims and objectives, and there is no mention of the other members of the commission. Indeed we are never even told who the other members were. The decision to ignore the politics of the inquiry is perhaps understandable since this has been systematically explored in Peter Gray’s monumental study, The making of the Irish Poor Law (Manchester, 2009). Nonetheless, it is striking that Ó Ciosáin neither discusses nor engages with Gray’s analysis, even when it is germane to his argument. Ó Ciosáin notes, for example, that unlike the reports of other royal commissions, the poor inquiry report made no direct link between the evidence taken and its conclusions. The commissioners amassed a vast amount of information but appear to have lacked both the means and the will to analyse it. To discover the reason for this, however, we have to turn to Gray who shows how the political divisions on the commission meant that an agreed report was always going to be problematic. Rather than a consensus view based on the evidence, therefore, the final report took the form of a summary of Whately’s views on Irish poverty followed by a number of unrelated proposals to which individual members of the commission were personally attached. None of the above detracts from the significant achievement this book represents. Ireland in official print culture is a well written, and deeply scholarly, study and will be of interest to all social and cultural historians of Ireland.