In November 1880, Irish Poor Law inspectors Mr Brodie and Dr Bourke travelled from Dublin to Belfast in order to conduct an official inquiry into the management of the city's workhouse. The inquiry, held in the workhouse boardroom over a five-day period, saw the inspectors interviewing a wide range of witnesses, from David Wilson, Chairman of the Board of Guardians, and Robert Hamilton, one of the city's magistrates, to James Kinnear, assistant clerk in the master's office, and 17-year-old Sarah Slevin, mill worker and occasional inmate of the workhouse. The inquiry focused on recent ‘scandals’ which had reached the pages of the press concerning the conduct of the workhouse master, Captain Whitla, the manner with which he carried out his duties, and the extent to which Poor Law regulations were adhered to particularly with regard to the strict segregation and separation of workhouse inmates.

This inquiry came about as a result of a series of allegations which had been made regarding the administration of Belfast workhouse in the pages of the local press, in a Belfast court and on the floor of the House of Commons. This particular episode was, however, just one of a series of public controversies surrounding the city's workhouse, all of which serve to highlight the tensions that existed in the late nineteenth century over the perceived role of the workhouse and its function as the principal provider of welfare for the city's poor. Much of this tension centred around the issue of space: pressure on welfare spaces in a city that was experiencing phenomenal growth; controversy between central and local authority over the appropriate use of workhouse space; and dispute between those who administered the workhouse and those who used it in relation to access to and movement within those spaces.

These tensions had existed in some form or another since the conception of the Poor Law and were not unique to Ireland. Felix Driver, in his study of the new English Poor Law on which the Irish system was based, highlights the extent to which various pressures shaped and modified the system over time, arguing that ‘despite the hopes of the architects of the new Poor Law in 1834, the subsequent history of workhouse administration bears the imprint of all kinds of conflicts, struggles and compromises’.