Even 'Wilder Workhouse Girls': The Problem Of Institutionalisation Among Irish Immigrants To New Zealand 1874

Studies of the Irish in New Zealand tend to focus predominantly on sectarian issues and respective 'identities'. While class is explored to a lesser extent, it is mainly through the lens of occupational status. Overall, migrant poverty and criminality in that colonial setting has received the least attention from historians, because the socio-economic profile of the majority of Irish immigrants was generally of a higher status. This article traces a group of poor assisted immigrants that departed Cork at very short notice in 1874 and examines how some of them achieved notoriety in New Zealand. Using a combination of poor law records, shipping records, newspapers, government reports and criminal statistics, this article traces the fortunes of the single Irish workhouse girls. Irish Poor Law registers can be notoriously tricky to negotiate and present many problems for historians. Periodically Poor Law Guardians invested in assisted immigration schemes and to that end they surrendered groups of migrants. In so doing, the guardians bound individuals by a range of similarities-marital status, social class, fiscal means, age, abilities and gender to mention but a few-and such groups lend themselves to case-study analysis. As prophesised by those who argued against its foundation, the poor law network in Ireland both created and exacerbated many social problems. In many respects, when over-crowding occurred, it offered little by way of training and thus created a stasis for poverty. Building on recent case studies of 'wild workhouse girls' undertaken by Anna Clark on the South Dublin Union and Virginia Crossman on a Wexford Union, this research explores the concept of 'modulation' used by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin in the context of migration, whereby migrants were at the mercy of the host community to decide whether they can be accepted or rejected.(1) This article traces and links the 'institutionalised' behavioural patterns of these poor, unskilled, single, young women with indefinite periods of 'modulation' in a negotiated space between rejection, vice, incarceration and an existence on the 'outside'.