Search Results for 'James Stewart & Co'

Around the year 1930, there were about 400 residents in Salthill and it was attracting large number of visitors and tourists who came in the summer. There was provision at the time for the building of some 100 homes. The population was growing but there was no church in the area. Any resident or tourist who wished to go to Mass had to travel into the Jesuit Church or St Joseph’s, or out west to the chapel in Barna.

Sixty six years ago this week, on June 16 1957, Pearse Stadium opened.

Lenaboy is the name of one of the townlands of Salthill. It derives either from the Irish Léana Buí, the yellow fields/land or Léana Báite, the sunken or drowned land. The latter explanation is the most likely as we look at this photograph of “The Cinema Site” taken from the main road at Kingshill in Salthill. It was so-called locally because James Stewart & Co tried to build a cinema there in the 1940s. Unfortunately, because of the boggy nature of the ground, the pylons they were sinking in order to put in a foundation kept sinking and disappearing and so the project was abandoned. In the 1960s an enormous amount of filling was gradually put into the site, and eventually, John King built a block of apartments there.

June 16, 1957, was a blistering hot day, a day of celebration for the Galway GAA fraternity. It was the day the president of the GAA , Seamus McFerran, officially opened the Pearse Stadium in Rockbarton.