Two hundred years ago, cattle fairs were held regularly at Fairhill in the Claddagh, then later in the century they moved over to Eyre Square where they often spilled over into adjoining streets like Williamsgate Street and Forster Street. They took place in the Square for a long time until they were moved to the Fairgreen.
Central to our image is a wonderful character study of a man, almost certainly a farmer, who has dressed up in his Sunday best to come to town. He is wearing plus-fours, a coat with tails, a waistcoat, and a top hat. It is hard to know whether he was buying or selling but he is certainly casting a professional eye over the product on offer.
The other interesting piece of drapery on show is the beautifully patterned shawl worn by the lady with her back to camera. Most country women wore shawls in those days and often had a regular one for daily use and a good one for going to church or to town. There were many different patterns and designs to shawls, and one could tell which part of the country, and often which parish, a woman lived in from the pattern on her shawl. All of the men we see are wearing hats, many of the city dwellers in bowlers and the rural gentlemen in flat wide-brimmed soft hats.
Joe Ward was a dealer who went from fair to fair and he commented as follows on an unusual aspect of the fair in Galway: "There were quite a lot of women - widows usually - selling cattle in Galway Town. I never saw it anywhere else. They'd have one, two or maybe three cattle for sale. They'd be saying the Rosary the whole time that they'd be waiting for a buyer to come along. If you wanted to slap their hands, to give £13 for the cattle, they'd have to change the Rosary beads over to the other hand, while they held out their right hand to get the clap on it. The women were often terribly hard to deal with - impossible - I usen't to bother with them at all."
Most of the farmers would have travelled to town by horse and cart, or donkey and cart. Some would have walked their cattle to town, and, if they did not sell, they had to walk them home again. That must have been a very dispiriting journey. There were other fairs held on the Square, horse fairs, pig fairs, sheep fairs. I was asked recently if there were ever goat fairs held there but I never heard of one. There were also different markets held in the Square, the most important of which was the hay market. Usually on Friday evenings, the carts came in and on Saturdays, the open space in the Square was covered over, so much so that it was difficult on some occasions to carry on other business in consequence of the great number of carts of hay in the market. Hay was a vital commodity for townspeople when the horse was the main mode of transport.
In the late 1940s there were some serious debates in the Corporation about the possible moving of the fairs from the Square to a new fair green proposed by the borough surveyor for Blake's Field in Bohermore. Some councillors felt it would be a serious step to relegate the principal business of the city to a location where no organization such as banks, etc, existed for the carrying on of that business. The county manager, Mr CI O'Flynn, said that the Corporation should make up its mind whether, having got a fair green, they would insist on the use of it, and not have the city run on village lines, filthy dirty on fair days. He understood that residents of the Square had a grievance on account of interference with their amenities on fair days. There was no use in providing a fair green unless the Corporation was prepared to adopt the bye-laws compelling the people to use it.
The fair did eventually move to the Fairgreen at Forster Street. It seems a very long time ago that cattle were seen on the streets of Galway.
Listen to Tom Kenny and Ronnie O'Gorman elaborating on topics they have covered in this week's paper and much more in this week's Old Galway Diary Podcast.
