Transactions of the RHS  (), pp. – C  Royal Historical Society  doi:./S THE POOR INQUIRY AND IRISH SOCIETY – A CONSENSUS THEORY OFTRUTH By Niall ´ O Cios´ ain READ  JUNE  AT THE QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST ABSTRACT . The most detailed contemporary ethnographic representation of early nineteenth-century Ireland can be found in the reports produced by the Poor Inquiry of –. Despite their richness, however, these reports remained marginal to contemporary policy discussions and public debate. This is normally, and correctly, attributed to the unpopularity and impracticability of the specific recommendations of the Inquiry. This paper argues that the marginalisation of the reports was also due to their discursive originality. It focuses on the voluminous oral evidence which was collected and published by the Inquiry. This evidence was taken in public from large groups representing all social classes, and much of it was printed verbatim. This method was unique among state reports of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, and unusual in social discourse more generally. It emerged from an equally unusual conception of truth as social consensus, a theory which the Inquiry adopted in order to overcome what it saw as the socially fragmented nature of representation in Ireland. The Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, which was active from  to , has a peculiar status within the history and the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland. Usually known as the Poor Inquiry, it stands out as the most substantial and comprehensive examination undertaken of pre-Famine society. The investigation lasted almost three years, inquired into a huge range of issues and produced three reports and a vast amount of appendices, containing over five thousand pages altogether. This thoroughness and scale has made it uniquely valuable to historians. One could put together a substantial book of articles that are almost entirely based on some section of it, such as K. H. Connell’s pioneering article on illegitimacy, Mary Cullen’s study of the household budgets of labouring families and the geographical studies of diet by L. A. Clarkson and Margaret Crawford. Extracts from the Inquiry appear in five separate sections in the volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing devoted to women’s writing, on subjects such as begging and infanticide. For these topics, the Poor 