Ballinasloe’s Cholera Spring
The immediate background was decisive. The potato failure of 1845 and the catastrophic failure of 1846 had exposed the dependence of a vast rural population on a single crop. Soup kitchens and relief works had eased suffering for a time, but their closure left the Poor Law as the principal official machinery of support. That system had been designed for ordinary destitution, not for a nationwide subsistence disaster. Admission to a workhouse often meant the break-up of a household, since men, women and children were separated into different wards. For people already ill, exhausted or homeless, however, the workhouse could seem the only remaining refuge.