The Famine reaches the workhouse door

The story

The Great Famine belongs within the town's history of buildings and work, as well as its national history. Dundalk's Poor Law Union workhouse opened on Ardee Road in February 1842. Louth County Council's historical account describes an institution originally intended for about 800 people, with additional accommodation for fever patients completed in 1845. By 1848 it held about 1,290 inmates; at the height of the crisis the account records an average of twenty deaths each week.↗1

These figures describe people seeking shelter, food and treatment, rather than an abstract population curve. The County Archives holds Board of Guardians material for Dundalk, opening a route towards research into how relief was administered. Records survive unevenly, and an institutional total should never be presented as a complete count of all Famine deaths in the town or surrounding countryside.↗1