During the first 20 years of the 19th century Maria Edgeworth was the most successful and celebrated living novelist. With her friends Sir Culling Smith and his lady wife they had travelled from Edgeworthstown, Co Longford, to Galway, and from there they planned a leisurely holiday in Connemara.
Prior to 1961, public performance of Irish traditional music in Galway took place primarily in the form of céilís in large dancehalls — namely in the Hangar, the Commercial and the Astaire. These were enormously popular — remember the hundreds of bicycles parked outside the Hangar on a Sunday night — but they began to go out of fashion in the sixties and were regarded as old fashioned and backward.
Hardiman and Beyond: The Arts and Culture of Galway since 1820 is the title of a new book being launched this Sunday as part of Cúirt. Edited by John Cunningham and Ciaran McDonough, it takes as its starting point the renowned James Hardiman’s History of the Town and County of the Town of Galway, published […]
“Voyagers from the grave” read the headline in a Melbourne newspaper,
The Advocate, in 1877, and the report was about three Galway men who had by then become known as “the shaughrauns”.
The previous November of 1876, four men, had set out to fish from the Claddagh in a hooker, named Saint Patrick.
In the words of the skipper, Michael Moran, he and his crewmen Michael Smith, Patrick Moran, and his uncle John Moran, made for Slyne Head, about sixty miles from Galway.
That night a tremendous storm carried the vessel 150 miles out into the Atlantic, where four days later, three survivors were rescued by a passing Swedish vessel and taken to America.