Search Results for 'Florence Nightingale'

Galway’s Declan McEntee decided to do something for charity to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday.

By this time of the year the first salads of the season should well and truly have been pulled and the second lot or subsequent sowing already developing along nicely. No better time then for the salad books to hit the shelves, although this particular ‘gem’ maintains it has a salad for every season.

Reading William Henry’s book Famine - Galway’s Darkest Days*, I was struck yet again by the fact that while thousands of people died of starvation in the west of Ireland, when whole communities abandoned their homes in a desperate search for food, our seas were boiling with fish. The author tells us that in Galway at the beginning of the Great Famine in 1845 the Claddagh fishermen fiercely protected their fishing rights in the Bay, which they regarded as their exclusive property. But as the famine dragged on to the end of the decade the Claddagh fishermen had no means left for catching fish. They had pawned their boats and fishing equipment for food. The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith in her classic account of the Great Famine**, tells us that on January 9 1847, ‘all boats were drawn up to the quay wall, stripped to the bare poles, not a sign of tackle or sail remaining....not a fish was to be had in the town, not a boat was at sea.’

Today (Thursday) is the 47th International Nurse’s Day. Set on the birthday of Florence Nightingale, this day was formed to honour the great work that nurses do all over the world.

2010 marks the International Year of the Nurse and the centennial year of the death of Florence Nightingale. In commemoration of the inspiring work carried out by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War and the years that followed, Mayo General Hospital, in association with nursing across County Mayo, is marking the event with a number of free events.