Irene was the site of one of the more than forty concentration camps where the British imprisoned the Boer (Afrikaner) women and children, whose homes had been destroyed as part of the British Army's 'scorched earth' policy during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). More than 1,200 people, most of them children, died at the Irene Camp. Today, the names of those who died here are memorialized at the Irene Concentration Camp Cemetery and Memorial.