The first formal meeting of the Board of Guardians of the Galway Workhouse took place in the Town Hall on July 3, 1839, and the building opened on March 2, 1842, one of many such workhouses built around the country. On March 16, the first pauper died from old age and destitution. The numbers of inmates gradually increased to 313 by May 1845, after which the Famine made a huge impact on the project. It was originally designed for 800 destitute persons but this quickly increased to 1,000. Included in the complex was an infirmary for sick paupers but this rapidly became the hospital for the city’s poor.
At the roadside was a large cut-stone entrance lodge which comprised a boardroom, clerk’s office, porter’s room, waiting area and probationary wards for paupers, males on one side, females on the other. Our photograph of this lodge was taken from the road by Fr James Mitchell in 1956, just before the building was demolished.
The main block was in the form of an H, the front and larger limb of the H was parallel to the road and had three storeys with an attic floor overhead. It included a master’s house, matron’s quarters, and a children’s room in the centre with dormitories for the paupers on each wing. To the rear of each wing were kitchens, washrooms, and privies. The smaller parallel wing of two storeys to the rear contained the infirmary, lying-in wards, and wards for idiots and lunatics.
There was a connecting link between the blocks which housed a chapel and dining room. There were recreational yards on each side of this building, one for men and boys, one for women and girls. The grounds were about eight acres in extent and completely surrounded by high stone walls.
Only the hospital section had beds, the rest had wooden platforms about 12 inches off the floor where paupers slept on straw palliases. Blankets were provided. There were no closets in the dormitories, inmates had to make do with night buckets which often overflowed and soiled the floor. They were required to wear workhouse dress, rough grey frieze suits for men, calico gowns and petticoats for women. There was strict segregation of the sexes even if it meant breaking up families, and many families refused to enter because of this. All members of a family had to be admitted and if the father absconded, the mother and children were thrown out. Foundlings and young orphans were usually accepted and placed in the care of female inmates.
The building was prison-like in appearance and the regime was deliberately harsh and intended to discourage people from seeking admittance. The diet was seven ounces of stirabout with half pint of milk for breakfast, and three and a half pounds of potatoes with a pint of skimmed milk for dinner. Children got lesser amounts. The Famine impacted on the workhouse from mid-1846 and by November 1847, there were 1,302 inmates with 313 paupers seeking admission. A store in Newtownsmyth was converted to cater for 300 to 400 children and auxiliary workhouses were commissioned at Dangan, Merchants Road, Barna, and West House in St Helen’s Street. In 1847, two fever sheds were erected in the grounds of the workhouse to cater for fever cases, the numbers in each varying from 150 to 190.
On census night, March 30 1851, there were 4,353 inmates in the workhouses of the Galway Union and 13,536 in the workhouses of the rest of the county, a total of 17,889 for the whole county, 5.5 per cent of the population. Numbers began to diminish from that date, there were 339 inmates in April 1900 and only 68 when the workhouse closed in August, 1921.
In that month, the pauper section of the workhouse was occupied by the British military but the infirmary section continued to function as the Union Hospital (it had been called that since 1893 ). In January 1922, the British handed their part of the workhouse over to the Irish army who vacated it on February 14, 1922.
In February 1922, the newly constituted Galway Hospitals and Dispensaries Committee met to organise the transfer the Galway Infirmary on Prospect Hill to the workhouse site. The general medical tuberculosis patients were moved first, the surgical services came later. This was necessary because of the need to refurbish the old pauper section of the workhouse to function as a hospital. It then became known as the Central Hospital, later the Regional Hospital, and today is known as University Hospital Galway.
