Search Results for 'Major General'

University of Galway has announced the winners of the 2023 Alumni Awards to be presented at a gala banquet on Friday June 16, 2023. The Alumni Awards recognise individual excellence and achievements among the University’s 128,000 alumni worldwide. These awardees are leaders who have demonstrated impact and excellence in their fields on a local, national, and international level.

It is somewhat ironic that the building on the Green in Castlebar where the Land League was founded should later bear a name denoting Empire - The Imperial. I sometimes sit on a bench on the Green or the Mall that traverses it and mentally step through the historical significance of what is before me.

Major General Henry Tudor arrived in Galway for the weekend on April 1 1921. On Saturday morning he inspected the RIC, then made his way to Lenaboy Castle to inspect the D Company Auxiliaries.

Sinn Féin’s declaration of an Irish Republic on January 21 1919, along with the killing of two RIC officers in Tipperary by the IRA on the same day, signalled the start of a guerrilla war for Irish independence.

The battle for Normandy June-August 1944, launched on D-Day exactly 75 years ago, marked, after Stalingrad, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. It was a major battle. The Allies suffered 209,672 casualties of whom 36,796 were killed. Some 28,000 Allied airman were lost in the months preceding and during the campaign.

One hundred years ago there were a series of truly terrible battles on the Western Front which were watched anxiously in Ireland as elsewhere. On June 7, near the Belgian village of Messines, the Allied army won a substantial victory. It gave hope, which turned out to be tragically false, that perhaps this was the beginning of the end of the war. With the capture of the Messines ridge, the Allies were confident they could clear a path all the way down to Passchendaele, and capture the Belgian coast up the Dutch border.

It was the action that went down in military history as much for its commanders’ incompetence as for its soldiers’ perceived heroism.

Castlebar came to a standstill on Wednesday afternoon and the business community shut their doors as the funeral of Private Ben Garrett, Kilnock, Breaffy, Castlebar, passed through the streets of the town in a military cortege before his burial in the New Cemetery in Castlebar. Private Garrett's body was found last Sunday in Galway following an 18 day search that saw hundreds of people scour the city and its surrounds on a daily basis looking for him after he was reported missing.