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Irish legislators had to negotiate rigidly defined gender roles, strict moral codes and contradictory sexual behaviour when implementing welfare policy in the early decades of the twentieth-century. Despite traditional and unforgiving attitudes to male and female sexuality, the debates surrounding welfare policy in Ireland reveal a more complex sexual landscape and an overriding concern regarding child protection and family welfare. Faced with real fears regarding the viability of the Irish family and the degree of child poverty, Irish legislators opted to use welfare policy to direct limited state resources towards the children of vulnerable and/or large families resulting in an apparently inconsistent approach to gender ideals.