Cholera was endemic, or perhaps pandemic, in Ireland during the Famine; several of my great-great-grandfather's children died of it in Roscommon in the 1840s, Roscommon being the county hardest hit by the Famine. As in most famines, it was disease rather than hunger that killed people - both people and the animals, both animals in the fields and pets, so they say: cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid.