When a medieval church is repurposed, the usual story involves demolition, rebuilding, or conversion into a grand house. What happened to the Franciscan friary church in Waterford in 1545 was rather more pragmatic and, in its own way, more revealing: carpenters simply laid a wooden floor across the nave and south aisle, inserted a new doorway above the existing west entrance, and declared the result a hospital. The building became the Hospital of the Holy Ghost, sheltering sixty paupers within the bones of a dissolved friary, the sacred geometry of a mendicant church quietly domesticated into a place of charitable refuge.

The Franciscans had been present in Waterford for centuries before the foundation, and their friary church provided a ready-made shell at a moment when the dissolution of religious houses was throwing such properties into uncertain hands. The hospital was established in 1545 and, according to the Reverend R. H. Ryland writing in 1824, it continued to provide shelter and support into the nineteenth century, a remarkably long run for an institution born out of improvisation and suppression. The conversion was architecturally modest but functionally effective: the inserted floor created a habitable upper storey accessed by the new doorway, making use of the height of the nave without disturbing its walls. Seven statues that once belonged to the hospital, six carved in wood and one in alabaster, survived the institution's eventual decline and were later preserved at the modern Holy Ghost Hospital at Grace Dieu, where they were noted and described in the mid-twentieth century by the art historian C. Macleod. Late medieval wooden religious sculpture is rare in Ireland, and the fact that six pieces from a single charitable institution survived at all makes them quietly significant objects.