There is no doubt, he said, that there have occurred in Ireland many outrages consequent upon vagrancy and destitution, and the people’s being left without remedy or relief; and also that a large portion of the people, especially those not having land, do practise mendicancy for a great portion of the year. He had made some inquiry with respect to the amount of the relief thus afforded to mendicants, and the result is that in most cases a shilling an acre is paid in course of the year by farmers for the support of mendicants. In some cases it has been 6_d._ an acre, in others 9_d._, and in others 1_s._; but in one case it amounted to 2_s._ an acre. This is a heavy tax, which cannot upon the whole amount to less than between 700,000_l._ and 800,000_l._, perhaps a million a year. But this practice of mendicancy, which raises so vast a sum, is not like a well-constituted poor-law, which affords relief to the really indigent—that which seems to afford relief to the distressed, also promotes and keeps up imposture, and in Ireland where mendicancy is so general, and relief so freely given, the number of impostors must be enormous. His lordship then proceeded to consider whether the workhouse system was applicable to Ireland; and after noticing the objection made by the commissioners of inquiry, and urged by others, that the workhouse would not be safe—that there would be too much violence—that there would be such a dislike of restraint that it could not be enforced—he came to the conclusion “that there was no reason to apprehend anything of the sort.” In some of the houses of industry, he remarked, they have carried the system of restraint further than in the old English workhouses, and have established the separation of sexes such as exists in the new English workhouses; and no regulation was proposed which did not now exist, so “there need be no fear that violence would be used, or that we could not protect the workhouses in Ireland, as well and as securely as the workhouses in England.”