Search Results for 'Gerry McNamara'

On January 15, 1827 two Patrician Brothers, Paul O’Connor and James Walsh, took up residence in Lombard Street and set up the Monastery School. The attendance on that first day was 300 boys, many of whom had little interest in learning because they were poor and hungry. So the Brothers set up The Poor Boy’s Breakfast Institute in May 1830. It continued seven days a week, 365 days a year for many years after the founders' time. The breakfast consisted of porridge with molasses or treacle, and during the Famine, they fed 1,000 boys every day. The ‘Old Mon’ became a vital cog in education in Galway.

“There is nothing as Galway as Our Lady's Boy’s Club,” was how our president Michael D Higgins described OLBC some years ago at a function in the Columban Hall. It is more than 80 years since it was founded and it is the longest-running youth club in the country. It was set up by Fr Leonard Shiel SJ at a time when there were was a lot of grinding poverty in Galway and no recreational facilities or extra-curricular activities for young people in areas like the Claddagh, Bohermore, Shantalla, and ‘The West’. The club provided these and has been a source of guidance and inspiration to thousands of young men and boys since, especially those from a working class background. From that first day of nervous membership, right through their teens, and even after they had taken up the challenges of adult life, the spirit and watchful eye of the Club is ever with them.

“There is nothing as Galway as Our Lady's Boy’s Club,” was how our president Michael D Higgins described OLBC some years ago at a function in the Columban Hall. It is more than 80 years since it was founded and it is the longest-running youth club in the country. It was set up by Fr Leonard Shiel SJ at a time when there were was a lot of grinding poverty in Galway and no recreational facilities or extra-curricular activities for young people in areas like the Claddagh, Bohermore, Shantalla, and ‘The West’. The club provided these and has been a source of guidance and inspiration to thousands of young men and boys since, especially those from a working class background. From that first day of nervous membership, right through their teens, and even after they had taken up the challenges of adult life, the spirit and watchful eye of the Club is ever with them.

This photograph was published on March 13 1959 by Alexander ‘Monkey’ Morgan (1919-1958), a wartime pilot for the Royal Artillery Air Corps, who launched a peacetime career in aerial photography before his tragic death in a plane crash. It is a detail from one of the images he took for the Irish Independent between 1951 and 1958. Some 200 of these have now been published in book form under the title Ireland from the Air. The book is a crystal ball into the past. The images are of such high quality that the detail just leaps out. Our image today is just a section of one of the photographs which we have enlarged.