Search Results for 'Gerry Hayes McCoy'

In 1831 Patrick Broderick, from Loughrea, was charged with insurrectionary crimes at the Galway Assizes, and cruelly sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a criminal colony ‘beyond the seas’ in New South Wales, Australia. He was barred from ever returning to his native land. His wife Mary, son John and daughters Ann and Catherine, were left destitute on the infamous Clanricarde estate, one with more than 2,000 tenants.

The distinguished historian Gerry Hayes McCoy, a graduate of the Bish, once wrote of his alma mater: “Going to school is the greatest emotional experience of a lifetime, the greatest and least forgettable. Do you remember how the sun shone through that wire-meshed window, shone in on your childhood, the bright sun of long ago? Do you smell again the smell of school-warm varnish, leather, bread and butter, ink, powder, books, boys? Do you remember the flinty yard, tree-shaded; the speaking river; the screaming seagulls on a frosty morning? How cold could it be! Do you remember the lighting of the fire — how it smoked without heat, how it smouldered. Do you remember the wonderful morning when the key of the school was lost and who-was-it was sent up town to the shop where — how unsporting — they kept a box of keys to thwart just so delirious a possibility.”

The Lion’s Tower was part of the old city wall. In the last century, it was situated on Eglinton Street between the Garda Barracks and the Savoy Cinema. Our photograph today, which we show you courtesy of the Board of Works, dates from about 1950 and shows the tower as seen from the yard beside the barracks.