Search Results for 'John McBride'

THE LIFE, times, and personality of Maud Gonne will be vividly evoked in a new stage presentation by local theatre-makers Caroline Lynch and Sarah O’Toole, of Mephisto and Anam Theatre companies respectively. The show, which could be described as a dramatised lecture, takes place on Thursday February 26 at 1pm in NUI Galway’s Cube Theatre and admission is free.

Like most national schools in the 1950s, the bunscoil in Coláiste Iognáid (the Jes) used to have a little break, known as a ‘sos’, mid morning. The lowest class in the Jes was Bun Rang II and they had a charismatic teacher named Power, who was known only as ‘An Paorach’. This man was a Gaeilgeóir who taught everything through Irish, but made it fun. You had to learn songs like ‘Beidh Aonach Amárach i gContae an Chláir’ or ‘Trasna na dTonnta dul siar, dul siar’. Weather permitting he would use the period of the ‘sos’ to take his pupils out drilling around the pitch, always carrying a whistle and issuing his commands in Irish.

The participants in the Galway Rising of April 1916 anticipated their arrest and humiliation. During Easter Week, while the rebels were attacking police stations in parts of east Galway, and threatening an invasion of the town, the RIC was quick to round up all the usual suspects. They were easily recognised. Their public training, and their interruptions of recruitment meetings made them well known to the police. They were loaded into open-top vehicles and paraded ‘for the entertainment of the townsfolk’. Volunteer Frank Hardiman remembered being set upon and beaten by rowdies at a number of places, and pelted with mud by the town’s inhabitants.