Search Results for 'Gerard Moran'

One of the remedies in dealing with overcrowding, and rebellious behaviour from frustrated and angry women in the workhouses during the famine years, was assisted emigration. This was done on a massive scale. Between 1848 and 1850, 4,175 women were sent direct from the workhouse system to Australia. This was in addition to the thousands already sent away assisted by landlords and other schemes to clear the land of unproductive tenants. The only cost to the individual Poor Law unions was for new clothes, and travel expenses to Plymouth, from where the girls embarked to the colony. 

Our photograph today shows a Karrier double-decker bus which was operated by the Galway General Omnibus Company. It was taken at the Spring Show in the RDS in 1924, before it went into revenue earning service. The side panel carries the name of the company, but not the crest. The small lettering on the chassis below the word ‘Galway’ reads ’12 m.p.h.’ A major problem with this type of vehicle was its chain drive which frequently slipped off and caused breakdowns. The bus had solid-tyred wheels and was uncomfortable to ride in.

The agricultural crisis of 1879, and growing civic unrest, prompted the Society of Friends in England to send James Hack Tuke to the west to inquire into conditions and to distribute relief. Tuke, the son of a well-to-do tea and coffee merchant family in York, England, published his observations in Irish Distress and its Remedies: A visit to Donegal and Connaught in the spring of 1880. In clear-cut language he highlighted the widespread distress and destitution at a time when the British government questioned the extent of the crisis.

The early 20th century in Ireland witnessed many significant events - 1916, the War of Independence, the Civil War, etc - and Galway was as caught up in those events as anywhere else in the country.

Irish emigrants have made major contributions to Canadian, Argentinean, American, British, and Australian life, but what might the world have missed out on if the Irish had not emigrated?

A NEW book on John Wilson Croker, the Galwegian who played a key role in the development of the Conservative Party in Britain, will be launched tomorrow.

Many years ago I had the privilege of being invited, with Alf MacLochlain, then the Librarian at NUI Galway, to contribute to a Radio One programme on the state of the Irish publishing industry, which was then flourishing for the first time in the country’s history.

For a country that is often highly conservative, Ireland has produced many important and influential socialist activists, thinkers, and politicians, and many of them have come from Galway.