Search Results for 'Johnny Cox'

Our photograph today, which is courtesy of Pat McPhilbin from Emmett Avenue in Mervue, shows a large factory building which was constructed by Sisk’s (with Jack Lillis in charge) on a site on Sandy Road in the early fifties. It was to house an industry called Galway Textile Printers which was known locally as ‘The Cotton Factory’, and even more colloquially as ‘The Cotton’. There already was a hat factory and a china factory here, but GTP was the first major industry to come to Galway and quickly became one of the biggest employers in the west of Ireland. Some of those who worked there were specialists who were brought in to help set the factory up, but most employees were local.

What we know as Salthill Park was originally a large field with a small lake. It was landscaped in 1907. In 1925 the Salthill Development Organisation (SDO) asked the corporation to clean up a cesspool there, but that took some years. In 1924, three councillors, Mr Bailey, Eyre Square, Martin Cooke, and John Coogan, bought an aeroplane hangar for the urban council for £400. It had been used by the RAF in Oranmore and was re-erected it in the park. It was called the Pavilion Ballroom, but everyone knew it as ‘the Hangar’.