Anthony Clyde

Anthony Clyde is a History PhD candidate at Queens University Belfast. He is researching how the elderly poor engaged with, and experienced, the Irish Poor Law and private charity in Ulster from 1850 to 1921. He completed a BA (with First Class Honours) at QUB in 2018. He then completed an MA (with distinction) in Irish History and Politics at Ulster University in 2019. 

Anthony is interested in Irish social and political history, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His PhD project, titled ‘Surviving or Thriving?: Old Age, Poverty and Welfare in Ulster, 1850-1921’, will bring an important new understanding of how the Irish poor law and private charity worked with regard to the elderly poor, and, crucially, how this developed over time in response to changing social attitudes to old age, as well as changing legislation, with a particular focus on the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act. It seeks to see if religious, political, class and gender identity, as well as geography, affected the elderly poors experience of and engagement with both strands of welfare provision.  It will make an important contribution to work currently being developed on the ways in which different groups, such as women and children, engaged with welfare in nineteenth early twentieth-century Ireland. Furthermore, a study focusing exclusively on old age poverty in Ulster is important as it will allow for a study of poverty and old age in the context of Ireland’s most urbanised and industrialised region that also had its own unique cultural, religious and political character.