Tommy Holohan is a living history of Galway city, and more particularly, a living history of one of its most unique areas - The Claddagh - and his passion for both has led him to discover and collect an extraordinary array of photographs, postcards, and documents charting the evolution of the city.
The Claddagh Tommy Holohan was born almost 71 years ago was an area well into its transition. It was mostly composed of the houses that can still be seen there today, but with a couple of the old thatched cottages left.
“My mother was from the Claddagh, my grandmother was from the Claddagh, all the family on my mother’s side were from the Claddagh,” Tommy tells me as we sit for the interview on a Monday morning. “My family were from Rope Walk, the longest street in Claddagh. I was a home birth and my grandmother, Annie O’Toole, delivered me. She was born Áine Ní Conghaile, her father was from Connemara, she married Mike O’Toole - but she died six months after I was born.”
Claddagh born
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Annie 'Nan' O’Toole and Mary ‘Maine’ O’Toole, photographed in 1913.
Believe it or not, you have seen Annie O’Toole and her daughter, Mary ‘Maine’ O’Toole, Tommy’s aunt. Both women are part of the famous colour photographs of the Claddagh and its people, taken by Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba in 1913 and included in French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn’s The Archives of the Planet project. “They were the first photographs taken in Ireland in colour,” says Tommy.
The Claddagh of Annie O’Toole was a fishing village of whitewashed, thatched cottages, not an area of Galway city. It was Irish-speaking, and its people, particularly the women, had a very distinct form of dress. It had its own unique traditions and identity. That had mostly gone by the time Tommy was a child, but its history was seeping into him with the stories his mother would tell.
“My mother was Margaret ‘Peg’ O’Toole, Annie’s daughter,” says Tommy. “When I was a child, my mother would go for long walks, and she’d bring me, and she’d talk about the old Claddagh. I wasn’t really listening, but at the same time I was, That’s where my love of the Claddagh started, because it is so unique, and it also created my love of history and the history of Galway.”
‘Claddagh people have so much to tell’
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Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
Tommy shares some of those stories of what the Claddagh would have been like in his grandmother’s day. “There was a time when you could not walk into the Claddagh, on the old wooden bridge that connected it to Galway city,”he says. “You had to come and stand and wait until someone asked you your business. You certainly couldn’t walk in and approach a woman. You would wait until you saw someone and then ask for the person you wanted to see.
“My grandmother would have been called a Bean Feasa, a wise woman. Way back she would have been called a wise witch. She wasn’t. She had cures. She had a cure on her tongue for your eye. If a child was born premature, she and another woman would hang a fishing net, place the child in the net, and underneath have a pot of water with items in it to try and replicate the conditions of the womb. All those things are forgotten, they're not really written down, but my mother told me all that at the time. That’s where my love of all that comes from.”
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Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
Nonetheless, Tommy contends that “the history of the village hasn’t really been told - the old people’s history”.
“Peadar O’Dowd’s book is fantastic,” he says, “and I have to commend him for it, but if you went to a Claddagh person and asked them, ‘Tell me your story’, they’d say ‘No! Sure what have I to tell?’ They tend to be shy. There are only a few of the old Claddagh families still left in the Claddagh, but they have so much to tell. In the First World War, the Claddagh put out more men in the British Navy, per capita, per size, than any other city in Europe. The navy came looking for them, they ruled the bay, you couldn’t come in fishing the bay, they’d sink your boat. The fishermen had their own area.”
Galway history up close
Having that background and heritage, and importantly, having his curiosity sparked by his mother’s stories, Tommy has, these days, become an avid collector of old photographs and postcards of Galway, and his collection charts the changing face of the city over the last 150 years.
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Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
It is a collection of images he shares regularly on his personal Facebook page, and the results are never less than fascinating - seeing places that are familiar, and yet somehow different; recognising buildings that have changed little in decades (Powell’s - The Four Corners is still recognisable in the older pictures of Galway ); marvelling at how some area are utterly transformed, becoming unrecognisable from how they once looked. The page has become widely popular and many appreciate this chance to see Galway’s history up close.
“I only went on Facebook last year, only after the pandemic,” Tommy says. “I’m not a tech person, but I catch up fast once you show me, and I love putting up the photographs.”
So where does his collection come from? “I collect any kind of photograph. Sometimes I find them, perhaps in a skip from a demolition site; or in second hand shops; some people give me photos. I get a lot of the photos from books, I will look for books no one else will look for. The reason I do it is because sometimes you come across a photo of the Claddagh you’ve never seen before, or of Galway you’ve never seen. I have a great collection of Galway postcards from across the decades. I will go and hunt stuff and I will buy rare stuff.”
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Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
Tommy goes through his collection of photos with me. There are pictures of Galway Harbour, when it was just a few sheds and some white painted houses; photos of the Galway Cathedral being built, with the wall of the old Galway Gaol still visible; pictures of a busy day at the St Nicholas’ market in 1961; photographs of Galway city rugby and soccer teams from the 1950s and 1960s; a photo of the GTM, the first supermarket in Galway, across from O’Gorman’s (now Easons ); a postcard of a wheel driven device in the River Corrib - between Long Walk on one side, and the Claddagh on the other - used to pull the nets up to catch Salmon; numerous photos and postcards of Salthill, including one featuring The Hanger, and old RAF shed that became a concert venue.
“I saw Thin Lizzy there in 1973,” says Tommy, “and I spoke to Phil Lynott. I called him at the side of the stage and I asked him, ‘How much are you getting?’ He said ‘£30 each’, and I said ‘Woah!’. £30 was a lot of money back then.”
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Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
Among the most fascinating artefacts in Tommy’s collection is a postcard marked as depicting Gort. However it is the north of Eyre Square. The buildings that are now the Imperial Hotel and Logues Shoe Shop are recognisable, and standing in the foreground are Britain’s King Edward VII and the future King George (then the Prince of Wales ), during Edward’s 1903 visit to Galway.
‘I love my city’
Having lived through so many changes in Galway, how does Tommy view the story of the city in his lifetime? “I grew up in the 1950s, back then, Galway was a backwater,” he says. “There was nothing happening. For a bit of fun we’d count the cars going down the road. We’d count the black ones or the red ones. There were always 50 black ones and no red ones!
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Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
“Where I lived on Grattan Road, the swamp was the Galway dump. We’d go back there as children looking for toys as we didn't really have toys. From the 1960s on, things began to change. It was lovely, to see the money coming in, and to see things improving. The city still has its faults, but there is a lot of good here as well. I love my city and I love its people.”
Tommy’s passion for the city and its history remain undimmed and he will continue to share his discoveries on Facebook.
“I like to let people see this,” he says. “I want to inspire young people into history, as the education system seems to be trying to write history out, and there is so much history in this town, so much Galway history that is not, or never has been told. There are so many photographs around, and a photograph will tell you a thousand things.”
