THIS TRIBUTE to Curran’s Hotel on Eyre Square is from my second poetry collection Time Gentlemen, Please, published in 2008. Curran’s was one of the main venues in the city for Left wing political meetings of all stripes from the 1970s until its eventual closure in 2002.
I attended my first meeting of Galway West Labour Youth there in April 1982 when I was 15. The guest speaker was Fintan Coughlan from the local Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I became heavily involved in socialist politics over the subsequent decade or so.
By 2002 socialism appeared to be a historical curiosity rather than applicable politics for the here and now. But, these days, the very red variety of politics I was first introduced to at my first Thursday evening Labour Youth meeting at Curran’s seems more essential than ever.
To Curran’s Hotel, Eyre Square, Galway
‘Electrical, Engineering and Plumbing Trade Union branch meetings moved to Tonery’s Bar, 98 Bohermore’
—noticed pinned to door 3-7-02
Religiously each week,
the endless Coke and Polo Mints
of impending world revolution. At fifteen,
homework knocked aside by your
insurrectionary video-nights:
Reds, October: Ten Days That Shook The World.
He who had the youth apparently having
the future. While on the wall –
Connaught Champions, 1974 –
some ancient darts team all saying: cheese.
Guest-speakers eclipsed
by the mouth at the back
with ‘something to add.’ All this
sent south, as demolition men make of you
a collapse of dust and rotten timber.
And it’s like watching the opposition's
last moth-eaten follower being
finally taken out and shot.
