Conclusion
2018 ◽
pp. 253-260
Contemporary discourse on the poor and on beggary was beset with the difficulties of defining just who and what was being discussed. Definitions of begging and vagrancy were imprecise, shifting and problematic. Begging was part of the ‘economy of makeshifts’ which the poor negotiated on a daily basis. Mendicancy in nineteenth-century Ireland was also a practice which involved and enforced gendered attitudes and roles.