Search Results for 'Beggar'

“Grey beards may tell tall stories of ‘The days when men were men’ but never, I feel certain, was there an All-Ireland Senior Football final so completely, and let me add, so distressingly satisfying as the 1956 decider yesterday in Croke Park where Galway defeated Cork by 2 – 13 to 3 – 7.

RICHARD HALTON, who performed the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of The Opera in London’s West End for six years, is coming to Galway.

Despite Liam Mellows and his men answering the call to arms, and for five days to have caused mayhem in the Oranmore and Athenry areas, Galway was slow to realise that the Easter Rising 1916 was to be a permanent affair. The town was known as a ‘showneen town’, that is a town with a close allegiance to the British way of doing things. This was mainly because of the status of having a major army barracks on its doorstep. The army was an important purchaser of supplies from the town merchants; and many local people were soldiers, or had husbands or boyfriends who were in the army.

IN BALLINASLOE train station two men sit and wait. One is Jude, a London-Irishman who has been involved in wild adventures and outrageous scrapes. Beside him sits a man who may well be his match.

Like most towns in Ireland, Galway was used to food shortages; they had occurred here in 1816, 1817, 1822, 1831, and in 1842 there were food riots in the city. Nobody, however, was prepared for what happened in 1845 when the potato crop failed. As winter approached, the situation did not seem any worse than usual, though people were concerned about food being exported from the docks while there was a shortage locally.

A beggar had been sitting by the side of the road for over 30 years. One day a stranger walked by. “Spare some change?” mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap.

There was a very good ethnological study on the fishermen of the Claddagh published in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1854, which among other things stated that: “The people of the Claddagh are, in my opinion, purely Irish, of the most ancient Celtic type. The village at the present day is like any ordinary Irish village, and that it was a mud city when Rome was being founded, is more than probable. That the Claddagh men are not Spaniards any one might see at a glance; and it is astonishing to me how the theory of their Spanish origins could have kept ground for so long. A Spanish face may still be seen in and about Galway — once in a week or so; but it appears to me that the Claddagh, above all other people, had no intermarriage with Spaniards.

A beggar who wilfully obstructed an elderly wheel-chair bound man and then abused a garda, calling him a “piece of s**t”, received a five month suspended sentence at the Galway District Court this week.