Search Results for 'Great Southern Hotel'

“I’LL TELL you something, I mightn’t be in this business at all if it wasn’t for a Galwayman, Des Kelly,” Phil Coulter tells me during our interview on Tuesday morning. “He was the leader of the Capitol Showband who were the biggest in Ireland when I was a student in Queen’s in Belfast.”

“Galway, the Capital of Connacht, historic metropolis of the Tribes and one of the principal cities of Ireland, looks sad, lonely, sorrowful and dejected without a cathedral, a cathedral towering over, and proudly commanding by its majestic presence the city and its surroundings. Our beautiful plaza, the Square, and I don’t mean the Green with its shoddy rusty time-worn railings — stands as it were, already prepared — God’s Holy Acre long waiting for the Cathedral of the rising resurgent west. The railings would of course be removed making the Green a spacious foreground, and incidentally a delightful parking space, an area almost as large as the Square itself. No spot on earth is good enough for God’s House and “the place where His glory dwelleth”. The Square is the best Galway can give”.

The 57th Galway International Oyster and Seafood Festival makes a welcome return to the marquee in Galway Harbour next weekend. The festival has been acclaimed as “one of the 12 greatest shows on earth” by The Sunday Times, and attracts over 10,000 international and local attendees each September.

Martin Shanahan, star of RTE’s hit TV programme Martin’s Mad About Fish stepped out of the kitchen to officially launch the 57th Galway International Oyster and Seafood Festival, taking place from September 23 to 25, 2011.

Whether for business or for pleasure it is comforting to know that when you reach your destination there is a beautiful room to rest a weary head, a cup of refreshing tea, and friendly staff to greet you, that is the ethos of the Oranmore Lodge Hotel where Ireland of the welcomes and Galway of the cead mile failte is not only an integral part of the business but a way of life.

Our image today is of an original drawing done in 1958 by Belfast artist Raymond Piper (now deceased) of the beautiful staircase in the Great Southern Hotel. When one entered the hotel, the reception desk was to the left, there was a small corridor leading to the dining room on the left, and another leading to the bar on the right. Just past these was a comfortable lounge area, and at the end of this was this magnificent staircase leading to reception rooms upstairs, and directly to the station platform.

Friedrich Engels is best known as the author of The Conditions Of The Working Class in England and as the co-author, along with Karl Marx, of The Communist Manifesto, but one of his least well known writings is about Galway, describing the county and its people in the aftermath of The Famine.

Like most towns and cities in Ireland, Galway had a lot of fairs and markets. They were a vital part of life and the economy of the city, helping to feed the local population and provide much needed cash for farmers in the hinterland.

If you thought that a well cooked meal complete with great service and relaxing atmosphere was near to impossible to find in Galway these days, well look again, because there’s still a gem of a restaurant to be found at the Hotel Meyrick in Eyre Square.

A lecturer in the GMIT school of hotel and catering has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Panel of Chefs of Ireland.