Famine relief soup kitchens Ireland: the 1847 Soup Kitchen Act

Famine relief soup kitchens Ireland set up in February 1847, under the Temporary Relief Act, bypassed the overwhelmed workhouse system entirely. Parliament paid instead for free, cooked food distributed directly to the destitute, under what was popularly called the Soup Kitchen Act. By that summer the scheme was feeding more people, more days a week, than any relief measure before or after it.

Famine relief soup kitchens Ireland: what the Temporary Relief Act did

The Temporary Relief Act (10 & 11 Vict. c. 7) received royal assent on 23 February 1847. Its stated purpose was “the temporary Relief of destitute Persons in Ireland,” and its method was direct: rather than build more workhouses or extend paid labour schemes, it authorised soup kitchens in every workhouse district and electoral division in the country.

The act drew its model from a scheme already running in Skibbereen, County Cork, one of the districts hit hardest by the blight in the winter of 1846 to 1847. There, a mixed public and private soup kitchen had shown that cooked rations could reach people faster than meal doled out for them to cook themselves, and with less risk of the grain being sold on. Parliament copied the approach nationally, and it replaced, rather than supplemented, the relief works and famine road schemes that had employed hundreds of thousands of people through the previous winter but were wound down as unaffordable that same spring.

It worked, in the narrow sense of moving food. Participation rose from roughly 780,000 people in May 1847 to close to 3 million by July and August, close to half the population still living in Ireland that summer. Local committees, often a mix of clergy, landlords, and resident magistrates, ran the actual kitchens under supervision from Dublin. This was famine relief in Ireland conducted at a scale the Poor Law alone had never attempted.

The Relief Commission and what its records show

The soup kitchens were overseen by the Relief Commission, a body with an unstable history. It was first formed in November 1845 to gather information and coordinate food imports, reorganised in January 1846, disbanded that August once ministers judged the crisis easing, then reconstituted in February 1847 under the new act. Each restart meant a change in staff and priorities, and the correspondence shows it.

The National Archives of Ireland holds two connected bodies of Relief Commission material. The Distress Papers, catalogued as CSO/RP, run from 1846 onward and consist mostly of letters from local relief committees: requests for funds, reports on food prices, arguments over who should sit on a committee. The Relief Commission papers proper, catalogued as RLFC/2, comprise 788 chronologically ordered entries drawn largely from correspondence received between September 1846 and April 1847, including constabulary returns and reports from county inspecting officers. Together they are the clearest surviving record of how a soup kitchen actually got approved, funded, and stocked in a given townland, and how often that process broke down.

The ration, and who ran the local kitchens

The act fixed what a person was owed, at least on paper. Speaking in the Commons on 25 March 1847, the chief secretary for Ireland, Henry Labouchere, set out the official daily ration as 1.5 lb of bread, or 1 lb of biscuit, or 1 lb of meal or flour, or 1 quart of soup thickened with meal, with a further quarter ration of bread, biscuit, or meal on top. He was, by his own account, correcting newspapers that had reported bread rations at half that size, and insisted the fuller figure was sufficient.

Delivering that ration fell to temporary relief committees set up in each poor law union or electoral division, made up of local magistrates, clergy of different denominations, and ratepayers, working under inspectors appointed by the Lord Lieutenant. Funding at the peak of the scheme in mid-1847 ran to roughly £100,000 a week from the Treasury, which spared local landlords the immediate cost, though the bill for Irish relief would return to Irish rates once the act lapsed. The system depended entirely on how well a given committee functioned. As the report from Erris below shows, that varied enormously from union to union.

Alexis Soyer’s model kitchen in Dublin

The most publicised soup kitchen of 1847 belonged to Alexis Soyer, chef of London’s Reform Club, who arrived in Dublin that spring at the government’s invitation. His Model Kitchen opened to the public on 4 April 1847 at the Royal Barracks Esplanade, a temporary timber structure 45 feet long and 40 feet wide, built around a steam boiler and a 300-gallon glaze pan, with eight bain-marie pans adding 1,000 gallons of capacity and an oven that could turn out 100 pounds of bread at a time.

At full operation the kitchen could seat and feed 1,000 people an hour at its tables, with several thousand additional quarts distributed by other means each day. The Cork Examiner credited Soyer with saving lives through his soup. Not everyone was as generous: critics objected to the 6-minute limit diners were given to eat, the chained spoons, and the sense that visiting dignitaries were touring a spectacle rather than a relief operation. The Freeman’s Journal described the scene as “a public parade of wretchedness,” a phrase that has followed Soyer’s Dublin venture ever since. Soyer handed the kitchen over to the South Union Relief Committee on 10 April 1847, and it continued to operate into that autumn under local management.

Quaker relief and the Central Relief Committee

Private charity ran ahead of government relief for much of the famine, and the Religious Society of Friends organised the largest of these efforts. Cork Quakers opened a soup shop on 11 November 1846, and within days Joseph Bewley, a Dublin tea and coffee merchant, convened the meeting that formed the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends: 21 members based in Dublin, with 21 corresponding members around the country and a parallel committee raising funds in London.

Quaker relief bodies handled around £200,000 over the course of the famine, close to £11 million in modern terms according to History Ireland’s account of the committee’s own published records. They distributed almost 8,000 tons of food and close to 300 soup boilers, sourced in part from a Quaker-owned foundry in Birmingham. The committee also sent investigators into districts the government was slower to reach. James Hack Tuke, then 27, spent two months touring Connacht in the autumn of 1847 and published his findings as “A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847,” a report addressed directly to the Central Relief Committee in Dublin that was later quoted in the House of Commons.

Soup kitchens in Mayo: the Erris report

One of the most specific surviving accounts of famine relief soup kitchens in Ireland’s poorest districts concerns the barony of Erris in north Mayo. Edmund Richards, supercargo of the relief steamship Scourge, reported to the Central Relief Committee in a series of letters dated 6, 10, and 13 March 1847. He put Erris’s population at around 30,000, with some 18,000 of them destitute and, in his account, a death rate of roughly 20 people a day from starvation in the barony.

Richards found only 4 soup establishments serving the entire barony, and at his first visit only one was functioning, selling “a very inferior article of soup” at a penny a quart rather than giving it away. Many of the destitute lived 8 to 10 miles from the nearest kitchen, a distance he judged some were too weak to walk even for free food. Two iron boilers shipped in on the Scourge sat unused on the rocks at Killybegs. He described the Erris relief committee as poorly functioning, with its Catholic secretary and Protestant chairman unable to work well together, in contrast to a committee at Clifden that he judged efficient. William Bennett, another English Quaker, distributed vegetable seed in Mayo and Donegal that same spring as part of a longer-term recovery effort alongside the emergency feeding.

For more on how that district fared once outdoor relief also failed, see the account of Black ‘47 in the Ballina workhouse union, and on emigration from the county in the years that followed, Mayo’s emigration history.

Why the soup kitchens closed

The soup kitchens were never meant to be permanent, and the government wound them down even as they were reaching their widest use. The Poor Law Extension Act received royal assent on 8 June 1847 and shifted the legal burden of relief onto local Irish poor rates, to be administered again through the workhouse system rather than free feeding. An amendment known afterwards as the Gregory Clause barred anyone occupying more than a quarter acre of land from receiving relief at all, forcing a choice between a smallholding and a workhouse ration that many families would not make.

The Temporary Relief Act’s soup kitchens closed in late August and early September 1847, only months after reaching their peak, and public works already wound down that June were not resumed. Responsibility passed to unions that were, in several cases, already close to bankrupt before the transfer was complete.

What historians cannot know

The Relief Commission’s surviving papers record what local committees reported, requested, and argued about, not what actually reached a given family’s door, or on which days a kitchen ran short. Mortality figures like Edmund Richards’s estimate for Erris were made under pressure, without a census to check them against, and probably understate as much as they overstate. No comprehensive tally exists of how many soup kitchens operated at once nationwide, only totals for people fed on the government’s own returns, which local committees had every incentive to report favourably.

Nor is it possible to know how many of the roughly 3 million people fed at the scheme’s peak had any other source of food that summer, or how quickly hunger returned to those same townlands once the kitchens shut in September. The correspondence in the Distress Papers picks up again within weeks, from many of the same committees, describing the same hunger under a different relief law.

The seven-month life of the Temporary Relief Act says less about whether the soup kitchens worked than about how narrow the government’s tolerance for them was. A scheme that reached half the surviving population and was, by contemporary and later accounts, comparatively well run, was still closed within months of reaching that scale, on the grounds that Ireland’s own rates, not the Treasury, should carry the cost from then on.

Sources and further reading

• Wikipedia, “Temporary Relief Act 1847,” consulted 2026, for the act’s citation, dates, and Skibbereen origin.
• History Ireland, “Quakers & the Famine,” for the Central Relief Committee’s formation, funding, and distribution figures.
• National Archives of Ireland, “Famine Records, Distress Papers and the Relief Commission” research guide, for the RLFC/2 and Distress Papers catalogue descriptions, together with the transcribed “Irish Famine Report from the Barony of Erris, County Mayo,” Edmund Richards’s letters to the Central Relief Committee, March 1847.
• RTE History, Helene O’Keeffe, “A Labour of Love: the Contribution of the Society of Friends” (2020) and “‘This Land of Sorrows’: the Poor Law Extension Act 1847” (2020).
• Hansard, House of Lords, “Soup Kitchens (Ireland),” 11 May 1847, for the parliamentary record of the act’s early implementation.
• Alexis Soyer archival project (alexis-soyer.com), “Soup Kitchens,” for the Dublin Model Kitchen’s dimensions, capacity, and operating dates.