Search Results for 'Bridget'

Galway has always been a city of stories—tales whispered through stone walls, sung across the bay, and told beside fire and pub counter. But few told them as lovingly and thoroughly as Peadar O’Dowd. Historian, teacher, author, environmentalist, tour guide, columnist, and tireless ambassador for Galway’s past, Peadar passed away on January 4, 2024, leaving behind a city immeasurably richer for his life’s work and immeasurably poorer in his absence.

Catherine Patricia Shiels O’Shea was born on January 22, 1931, the youngest of five children, known locally as Patty Shiels. Her father Patrick was a carpenter who built one of the first radios in Galway, her mother Bridget a homemaker. They lived in Bohermore. Her mother died when she was very young, leaving her elder sister Teresa to care for the siblings and their elderly father. Pat went to national school in the Presentation Convent and to secondary in the Mercy Convent.

Busking is the practice of performing in public places, such as on the street, for tips or gratuities or voluntary donations. It comes from the Spanish word Buscar—to seek (fame and fortune) or the Latin word Buscare – to procure, to gain. Busking could take many forms, clowning, dancing, singing, fortune telling, mime, living statue, one-man band, puppeteering, juggling, reciting poetry, even Christmas carolling. One’s ‘pitch’, where one performed, was very important. It had to be a place where there was a lot of traffic, lots of people, high visibility and little background noise.

Blake’s Castle is a medieval urban fortified town house at the bottom of Quay Street which was built c1470 with single bay ground and first floors and a two-bay second floor. It has a flat roof with a crenelated parapet with a projecting machicolation on supporting corbels on the top floor above the entrance. This was an opening at the parapet through which defenders could drop material such as boiling water or hot pitch down on would-be attackers. It was built with coursed roughly dressed limestone rubble walls with square headed window openings to the upper floors.

Peadar O’Dowd’s credentials for writing about Galway were impeccable. One of four children, Nono, Willie, Martin and Peadar, born to their parents John and Bridget, he grew up in Bohermore and was always grateful for the fact. He lived his life there and throughout that life would celebrate the area and its people in hundreds of articles and interviews he published in various newspapers and journals.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the contributors to its 2023 exhibition programme, titled honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais.

Edwin Sammon, the award-winning comedian known for his role as Father Gabriel in RTÉ's Bridget and Eamon, is back with a brand new comedy show. In "Edwin Sammon Of Knowledge", he shares his personal journey through love, lockdown, and fatherhood, while bringing his signature surreal and witty style to some of life's biggest questions.

In early October 1884 a journalist from The New York Times, whom we only know by his initials HF, left Galway for Cong by steamer, in the company of Mr TP O'Connor, MP for Galway, and Mr Healy, MP for Monaghan.

The late Hubert Butler once wrote a delightful essay called Influenza on Aran in which he examined the evidence for the early Irish saints. His title is explained in the first few sentences: “When I arrived in Aran by the Naomh Eanna at Kilronan I was sneezing, and by the time I had raced to St Enda’s Church at Killeany and seen the stone on which he had floated in from Connemara I was feverish and coughing.

Colum McDonnell