A spailpín (Irish: [ˈsˠpˠalʲpʲiːnʲ]), anglicised as spailpeen or spalpeen, or "wandering landless labourer" was an itinerant or seasonal farmworker in Ireland from the 17th to the early 20th century.
Women began to participate as workers to an important degree only in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Scottish potato fields.
Even before this, they provided support for the men by traveling with them; they begged for food and money to keep themselves and their children alive until the men returned home, and they undertook and organized essential farm work back in Ireland, thereby maintaining the small holding of land as the family home".
For an excellent example of such a lament, see Matt Cranitch, The Irish Fiddle Book, Ossian Pub, page 114 and recording number 47.
Irish-language writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain's writing featured "dark ambiguities, seething resentments and petty humiliations" endured by spailpíní.