The history of Ballinasloe
The ford of the crowds, the castle, de Burgh, the fair, the canal, the railway, the workhouse, the floods of 2009. 15 moments, in order.
- Bronze Age
A crossing on the Suck
The town grew at a crossing of the River Suck, the Shannon tributary that divides Galway from Roscommon; the Irish name means the mouth of the ford of the crowds. Bronze Age sites, a crannog and ringforts in Garbally demesne show people were here long before the town. Saint Grellan, by tradition, built the first church.
- 1114
Dún Leodha
The Annals of Lough Cé record a hosting in 1114 at Dún Leodha, the old name of the place, where Toirdhealbhach Ua Conchobhair and the Connachtmen met the northern kings across the Shannon.
- 12th to 14th century
The castle
A castle was built on the east bank of the Suck in the twelfth or early thirteenth century to guard the ford, and rebuilt or enlarged by the O'Kellys of Hy-Many in the fourteenth. The ruins of its outer wall are still there.
- Early 1200s
De Burgh's town
Richard Mór de Burgh, who died about 1242, is credited with founding the town early in the thirteenth century. The larger part west of the river lies in Kilclooney parish in Galway, the part east of it in Creagh parish in Roscommon.
- 1700s
The fair
The October horse fair, reputedly the oldest in Europe, dates from the eighteenth century; it marked its three hundredth anniversary in 2022. Once mostly agricultural, it is now about the horse, with a market, fireworks, a dog show and a funfair by the theatre, and up to 80,000 visitors.
- 1700s to early 1800s
A town in limestone
The centre was laid out in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The town's limestone went into its public buildings: the Garda station of about 1840, a cut-stone terraced house of three storeys, and the courthouse of the same date, roofs and walls alike.
- 1828
The Grand Canal arrives
From 1828 until the 1960s Ballinasloe was the western terminus of the Grand Canal, and Guinness used the canal stores here to supply the midlands by barge from Dublin. A public marina on the Suck now lets boats in from the Shannon navigation.
- 1833 to 2013
The asylum
The Connacht Asylum opened in 1833 and became St Brigid's Hospital; it declined after deinstitutionalisation in the late 1980s and closed in 2013.
- 1841
Town commissioners
The town commissioners first met on 22 February 1841 at Craig's Hotel under Rear-Admiral William Le Poer Trench, and their first job was public lighting: a gasworks went up at once for £1,421. The body became an urban district council in 1899, a town council in 2002, and was abolished with all the others in 2014.
- 1842 to 1851
The workhouse
Opened in 1842 for £9,500 and built for a thousand, the workhouse held 2,487 people at the 1851 census. A 64-bed fever hospital went up beside it in the mid-1840s; only its main block survives.
- 1851
The railway
The station opened on 1 August 1851 on the Dublin to Galway line, and trains still stop.
- 1943
Portiuncula
The Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood opened Portiuncula Hospital in 1943; it is now a university hospital. Gullane's Hotel has served the town since the same year.
- 1978
Supermac's
The fast-food chain opened its first restaurant in Ballinasloe in 1978; by 2019 it had 116 outlets, three of them in the town.
- 2009
The floods and the bypass
In November 2009 the Suck burst its banks, forty families were taken out by boat and buildings stood under water for weeks, with damage put at more than eight million euro. The M6 opened on 18 December that year and ended the town's famous traffic jam on the old Dublin road.
- 2021
Under the footpaths
A survey for the street enhancement scheme in September 2021 found human skeletons and seventeenth-century objects twelve centimetres below the footpaths.
Where this comes from
Every paragraph above summarises a statement in Wikipedia, "Ballinasloe", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as it read on 2026-09-19. Follow it for the footnotes. Nothing has been added from memory.