Search Results for 'Columban Hall'

Paschal Spelman may have been given that name at birth, but to the many thousands of people (especially old Galwegians) he entertained down the years, he was simply known as ‘Foggy’.

FROM EPIC, ancient, voyages to the ‘girls night out’, from stories of bag ladies to the return of Christ, the Galway Fringe Festival theatre strand has it all.

PLAYWRIGHT AND novelist Mick Donnellan is not a man to rest on his laurels. Having enjoyed popular and critical acclaim for Gun Metal Grey, Sunday Morning Coming Down, and Shortcut To Hallelujah, he continues to press forward.

Our Lady’s Boys’ Club was founded in 1940 by Fr Leonard Shiel SJ. The main object of the club was “To provide for the relief of poverty by helping kids in need, by promoting human services which would meet long term means, and by those means to encourage their development and give their lives a dignity which is their birthright.”

MORE THAN 100 events will take place during the Galway’s Fringe Festival which runs from July 12 to 28, including a new play by Mick Donnellan, author of Gun Metal Grey.

St Bride’s was situated on Sea Road and was opened in 1916 by Dr William AF Sandys. He was soon joined by Dr Michael O’Malley and by Dr Joseph Watters, who was the anaesthetist. Both doctors Sandys and O’Malley lived in the Crescent, so it was very convenient for them. It was a private nursing and maternity home accepting medical, surgical, and maternity cases. Generations of Galwegians were born here, and many more would have had their tonsils out or their appendix removed here.

The history of theatre in Ireland goes back to the start of the 17th century. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of plays written in Irish and that movement was given a significant boost with the opening of An Taibhdhearc on August 27, 1928. It is the oldest operational theatre in Galway and is Ireland’s National Irish Language Theatre. The title is made up of two Irish words, taibh meaning ‘spectacle or ghost’ and dearc meaning ‘behold’.

Our photograph today is of a 1950s soccer team representing Our Lady’s Boys Club, taken in Terryland where facilities were quite primitive at the time and, as you can see, the preferred mode of transport apart from shank’s mare was cycling. The team is, back row, left to right: Patsy Burke, Richie O’Connor, Brod Long, Brendan Dowling, Paddy Power, Tommy Carr, Paddy Beatty. In front are Danny Collins, Billy Carr, John Rushe, Steve Mannion, Gus O’Connor, and Barney Birkett.

Eugene Daly was a 29-year-old weaver in Athlone Woollen Mills who decided to leave his job and go to America. He paid £6-19 for a third class ticket and boarded the Titanic at Queenstown. He was a piper and played native airs on board the tender on the way out to the liner. One of the survivors later sourly noted, “Looking astern from the boat deck, I often noticed how the third-class passengers were enjoying every minute of the time, a most uproarious skipping game of the mixed double was the great favourite whilst “in and out and roundabout” went a man with his bagpipes playing something that ‘faintly’ resembled an air.”