RESOLUTION. (Hansard, 12 June 1866)

§ MR. M. MORRIS

rose to call the attention of the House to the state of the law of removal from Great Britain to Ireland of persons receiving relief, and to the injustice of maintaining a system which was applicable in favour of Great Britain only. The hon. Gentleman contended that the present law was one of injustice to Ireland; that there was no reciprocity in it between Ireland and the sister countries. The law which commenced in the reign of Queen Anne was amended by the 8 & 9 Vict. c. 117, which contained various provisions in reference to parts in Ireland where paupers were to be removed. It was surely a great injustice that a female who left Ireland in her childhood and married and settled in England could be removed, if her husband died and she became destitute, to a country which she had long left, and where she had no friends. It was unnatural, also, that children over sixteen years of age, if they applied for relief, could be taken from their parents and conveyed as prisoners to Ireland. In the last Report of the Irish Poor Law Commissioners instances were given of the hardship which was occasioned by the transfer of paupers from England to Ireland, and some of them read more like sensation novels than facts. He would only mention two cases. On the 6th of January in the present year Elizabeth Finn and her four children were removed from Toxteth Park union to Wexford under the plea of desertion by her husband, who had merely gone in search of work. She was forcibly removed, officers of justice attending her as if she had been a culprit, and prepared to handcuff her if she resisted. Her husband on returning home was of course surprised to find his family taken away. He naturally wrote for them, and they came back to Lancashire. The other case to which he would refer was that of Mary Barry, who with her two children were removed from Westminster to Limerick on the 9th of 300 November last year. She was twenty-eight years of age, and had lived for sixteen years in one employment in London. Her husband having left her in search of work, she was taken from the workhouse, put into a cab, driven to St. Katharine's Wharf, and thence despatched to Limerick, the place of her nativity. Her husband, on his return, wrote to her, expressing his surprise and indignation at such proceedings, and his hope that the guardians of the Limerick union would send her back, as he had plenty of employment and was able to maintain her. It was monstrous that such arbitrary acts could be committed under the pretence of desertion, for to constitute desertion, as had been laid down by so eminent an authority as Chief Justice Erle, a man must have left his wife without reasonable probability of returning. The report from which he had taken these cases stated that an additional impulse had been given to these removals by the recent reduction of the term of irremovability from three years to one year, and it urged that such an interference with the liberty of the subject, which was unknown in any other country of Europe, should be abolished. In the case of Ireland there was an especial grievance, for under the Poor Law of that country persons were entitled to relief in the place where they became destitute, and many soldiers' wives and other persons who went to live in Ireland received relief under this provision. The law in Scotland was similar to that in England, so that Ireland enjoyed no reciprocity in the matter. An Act had been passed in the reign of Her Majesty making provision for the removal of paupers from England to Scotland, and from Scotland to England, and from both to Ireland, but there was not a word about their removal from Ireland to either England or Scotland. That reminded him of the triangular duel in Mr. Midshipman Easy, in which one of the combatants found that the pistols of the two others were levelled at him. At present a residence of one year in a particular union was required to insure irremovability, so that if a person had resided forty years in England in the same place, if he changed his union and applied for relief, he might be removed, and even handcuffed, if he could not show that he had resided in the union from which he sought relief for twelve months. That was a monstrous state of things. There was a Mr. Frost, living in Wapping, who had formed a depôt for 301 the export of paupers to Ireland, and the report which he had in his hand was full of attempts to make the agents of this man Frost amenable to the law, which inflicted the mild penalty of £10 in case the person in charge of the pauper deserted him while taking him over. He (Mr. M. Morris) objected to the system as an unnatural one, and as having no reciprocity. When the late Mr. Herbert brought in a Bill to enable Irish Boards of Guardians to deport English paupers to this country, the House of Commons would not sanction it, and very justly, for justice and common sense would say that these poor people ought not to be removed from places where they had lived all their lives to other places where, perhaps, they knew nobody, and nobody knew them. In conclusion, he begged to move that, in the opinion of this House, this was a question that ought to receive the immediate consideration of Her Majesty's Government.

§ MR. C. P. VILLIERS

hoped the hon. and learned Gentleman would excuse him for not entering fully, at that late hour, into the subject which he had brought forward, which was certainly nothing less than the whole law of settlement and removal; because the hon. Gentleman had argued against the operation of that law as it had existed in this country, and as it had acted indirectly upon Ireland, and the arguments that he had used against the policy of that law were as applicable to England as to Ireland. ["No, no!"] The hon. Gentleman has been arguing against the hardship of removing people from places where they have been living and employed, to places where they have no friends, and are not wanted, and so far the hardship is the same, whether the persons removed are English or Irish. The hon. and learned Gentleman is perhaps under the disadvantage of not having had a seat before in this House; because if he had he would have known how old a grievance this law has been, and with what prejudice and opposition anybody has had to contend who has attempted to alter a law which had lasted for two centuries. The hon. Gentleman would also have acknowledged that this subject had received peculiar attention of late years; as it had applied to Ireland it had 302 most certainly not been unattended to by Irish Members any more than by the Government. During the last five or six years there had hardly been a year in which this question had not arrested the attention of the Government, and some mitigation of the hardships of removal had not been effected. When I became connected with the Poor Law Board, the state of the law was such that any Irish poor person who could not prove that he had lived consecutively for five years in the parish at which he applied for relief, and never had been chargeable, was liable to be removed not to any specified place in his own country, but to any part of the coast of Ireland, That had struck him as, doubtless it was, a very great hardship, and yet he was assured that his predecessors had made great efforts to change the law, and the hon. Member for Cork had been most zealous and assiduous in his endeavours to procure a change, and had often brought the subject before the House; and he could say truly, that he had been much assisted by that hon. Gentleman in effecting the change that was made three years ago, and which provided that any person who had lived three years independently in any part of the union could not be removed, and when removable, he could then be sent only to a place where he was known or where he had been born. The arrangement then was that the paupers were to be left in the union of the port where they were landed, and that union was to be reimbursed by the removing parish in England for any expense incurred in conveying them to their destinations. Some evil was found to be attendant on that course in the following year, and in consequence he had introduced a Bill, which was carried, providing, that, if any union removed any poor Irish person, that they should employ an agent to convey him to the place of his destination, so that he might be certain to reach it. So far, the intention of Parliament, in rendering the law more humane, was clear. The hon. Gentleman, however, considers that he has reason to complain of the manner in which the law has been carried out, and has reflected severely upon the conduct of the agent who has been employed by the London unions for this purpose, and who has a depôt in London for the reception of paupers to be removed. The hon. Member points to particular cases where there has been misconduct in this respect. He knew that there had been 303 such cases, and he had done the same as he had done in every other case, where-ever they were brought under his notice, in directing the fullest inquiry to be promptly made in the matter. The hon. Gentleman would see that the person charged had been prosecuted for deserting a pauper and convicted, and not being able to pay the penalty he had been imprisoned. So far, the law would have been operative, he hoped, had the circumstances continued the same; but the hon. Gentleman has referred to, and is therefore acquainted with, a recent enactment called the Union Chargeability Act, by which the position of the Irish poor had been greatly improved, and at present any poor person who had lived only one year in any union could not be removed, and if in want, must be relieved. Had such a measure been proposed before, it would have failed; but, by previous legislation, it had been found practicable, and I believe its real effect will be to put an end to the removal of the Irish poor altogether. The hon. Gentleman had been misinformed as to the mode in which he thought that Act would operate harshly to the prejudice of the poor. He doubted whether any sufficient experience had yet been obtained of its operation, or that any return could yet have been given of the removals, if any, that had occurred under it; for, as he had said, he believed that the effect of the Act, both by facilitating the means of obtaining the status of irremovability and by the requirements of the law in the mode of the removals, would be to abolish the system of removal altogether. If the poor even returned again to this country, and lived a year in a union without being chargeable, they would alike be still irremovable. The hon. Gentleman must now have a little patience. The improvement had been gradual but certain during the last few years. Not twelve years ago 10,000 Irish paupers had been removed from Liverpool alone to Ireland in one year, and last year he doubted if there had been 100, and throughout the whole country there had been a great change of system, and the number of removals were greatly reduced. It was under these circumstances of great improvement having already taken place, and still more being expected, that he hoped the hon. Gentleman would not press upon the House a further change of the law at present. The experiment that was now going on should, at least, have fair play; 304 but should it be found that the hon. Gentleman's views were borne out, and that the present law operated more harshly than that which preceded it, he would give his most serious consideration to any measure that might be proposed, and, indeed, his own earnest efforts to effect a further amendment of the law.