Search Results for 'Joyces distillery'

One hundred and eighty years ago, the Sisters of Mercy came to Galway for the first time, to a house in Lombard Street, to devote themselves to works of mercy among the poor. The great Catherine McAuley was one of the first three nuns to come here, the others being Mother M Teresa White and Mother N Catherine Leahy.

“The Younger Women with their cloaks draped around their heads looked piquant enough, their faces had not unfrequently the sweetest expression of passion, and their lips pouted charmingly. The old fisher-wives, on the other hand, who sat near the casks and smoked damp tobacco in short clay pipes, had something witchlike and menacing about them.” So wrote Julius Rodenberg in 1860. He obviously had a thing for beautiful young Galway women as he also wrote about them elsewhere. As for the older women, I would say they just glared at him because he did not buy any fish. Otherwise, what he wrote could be true of our 1908 photograph.

In the 1600s trade tokens were given out by the Crown and were used as a royal licence to do business. If you were a trades or business merchant, you had to obtain this token. Some had dates on them and some had not. In Galway city and county there were 43 merchants listed in the period 1653-1679. By 1680, many of these tokens were replaced by the halfpenny copper coin.