Search Results for 'Celine'

On this day 70 years ago, June 1 1953, Scoil Íde opened for the first time. In 1952, the Sisters of Jesus and Mary purchased Allen’s Hotel on Dalysfort Road which had been run by John and Angela Allen. It had at one time been known as Daly’s Fort House, a high-class hotel run by a Mrs Galbraith. She sold it to a Mr Miller of Persse’s Distillers who used it as a private house and he sold it on to the Allens. Many will remember it as the place where Bruce Woodcock, the English Heavyweight champion, trained for his famous fight with Máirtín Thornton.

World-renowned Irish soprano, Celine Byrne, is to perform her first concert in Galway which will raise vital funds for mental health non-profit Let’s Get Talking, on Saturday April 23.

The words of the late John O’Donohue, “The beginning often holds the clue to everything that follows” could be said to be prophetic if applied to the date of May 1, 1952, in Salthill. On that day, the courageous Sisters of Jesus and Mary opened a national school in what had been a small hotel known as Dalysfort House or Allen’s Hotel in Árd na Mara. They called it Scoil Íde and had 43 pupils. I don’t know if the teachers, Sisters Immaculata and Celine, had any idea of what kind of impact that beginning would make on education and social life in Galway, but if they had, it would have been beyond their wildest dreams.