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of agrarian occupation, and that this change necessarily implies a long, continued and systematic ejectment of small holders and squatting cottiers.” During the first two months of 1847, in the House of Commons debates on the famine in Ireland, Sir William Gregory had argued against the system of relief being used. He supported the idea of assisted emigration. He also proposed an amendment to the Poor Law Act in March 1847 that was to have far-reaching implications. The clause stipulated that no one who held a lease for more than a quarter of an acre of land should be allowed to enter the workhouse or to avail of any of the relief schemes. This meant that a cottier tenant whose potato crop had failed a second year in succession and who had no money to buy food would be faced with a stark choice. If he wanted to take his family into the workhouse, the only place where they could be fed, he would have to give up his lease and he would never get it back. His mud cabin would be razed to the ground as soon as it was empty. If he and his family survived the workhouse, where disease was rampant, they would have nowhere to go. They would have to live on the side of the road, or try to emigrate . Nor could a man send his wife and children into theworkhouse and stay on the land himself. They could get no relief unless he gave up the lease. “Persons”, Sir William said in the House of Commons, “should not be encouraged to exercise the double vocation of pauper and farmer.”
    In his autobiography, Sir William quotes the Dublin University Magazine article from 18 to justify himself: “That this clause has been perverted to do evil no one can deny, and those who only look to one side of the question have often blamed its author for some of the evils that were inflicted by its provisions … The evil results we have alluded to were not foreseen, certainly they were not believed in by Mr Gregory, whose advocacy of the emigration clause is the best proof of his good motives to those who do not know the humanity and the kindness which, then and always, have marked his dealing with his tenants on his own estates.”

    The effects of the clause, however, were foreseen by those who voted for it in the House of Commons on the night of 29 March 1847, as well as by the nine MPs who voted against it. Sir William’s proposing speech was followed by William Smith O’Brien, who was reported as saying: “If a man was only to have a right to outdoor relief upon condition of his giving up his land, a person might receive relief for a few weeks and become a beggar for ever. He thought this was a cruel enactment.” Another speaker in the same debate said that the consequence of SirWilliam Gregory’s clause “would be a complete clearance of the small farmers of Ireland – a change which would amount to a perfect social revolution in the state of things in that country … to introduce it at once would have the effect of turning great masses of pauperism adrift on thecommunity.” Hansard reported that Mr Bellew, speaking in support of the clause, argued that it “would tend to the gradual absorption of the small holdings now so extensively held, as well as the conversion of masses of starving peasantry into useful and well-paid labourers”. And Sir G. Grey in the same debate said that he “had always understood that these small holdings were the bane of Ireland”.
    In his autobiography, Sir William wrote: “There is no doubt but that the immediate effect of the clause was severe. Old Archbishop MacHale never forgave me on account of it. But it pulled up suddenly the country from falling into the open pit of pauperism on the verge of which it stood. Though I got an evil reputation in consequence, those who really understood the condition of the country have always regarded this clause as its salvation.”
    The Gregory Clause radically reduced the number of small tenants.