Search Results for 'Norman Healy'

Our first image today is a beautiful study of part of Shop Street c1900. It is one of a number of Galway city photographs that are in an old album belonging to Norman Healy whom we thank for sharing it with us. The two women in the foreground are in their working clothes, plain black shawls and práiscíns which were heavy canvas working aprons used to carry vegetables or maybe fish in, or wear when they were washing clothes. One is carrying a basket which probably contained product she had to sell, possibly eggs, country butter or vegetables. The other lady may have had a basket strapped to her back. The gentleman behind is wearing an impressive white báinín jacket.

This superb image of Martin Cunningham’s butcher shop at Number 10, Shop Street was taken c.1900. In the 1901 census, the occupants of this building are listed as Martin Cunningham, aged 50; his wife Delia aged 30 and their children Michael aged 12, Mary Margaret 7, James 3, Delia 2 and Martin J. who had just been born. The family lived over the shop.

The station opened on August 1, 1851. The buildings and the Great Southern Hotel were designed by John Skipton Mulvany. It was originally planned to have the station at Renmore, but the well-known Father Peter Daly convinced the railway authorities to construct Lough Atalia Bridge and bring the trains into the centre of town. The fact that he owned tenement buildings on the site where the Great Southern was built may well have had something to do with it. These tenements were levelled to make way for the hotel and station.

The initial refusal by the Loughrea Workhouse hospital to accept smallpox patients was smartly over ruled by the Local Government Board (LGB). It suggested that some out-houses or offices, at the hospital, could be converted to receive the patients while keeping them separate from the other sick. It was satisfied that the resident doctor there, Dr Lynch, ‘will afford valuable advice and assistance’. The board warned that it was essential smallpox sufferers were kept isolated from other people. However, the Loughrea Board of Guardians, with responsibility for the hospital, did not heed the rebuke.

‘Westward Ho! Let us rise with the sun, and be off to the land of the west - to the lakes and streams - the grassy glens and fern-clad gorges - the bluff hills and rugged mountains - now cloud-capped, then revealed in azure, or bronzed by evening’s tints, as the light of day sinks into the bold swell of the Atlantic….’ So begins Sir William Wilde’s famous Lough Corrib - Its Shores and Islands (published 1867), adorned with wonderful woodcuts, as he calls us all to join him as if in a bi-plane, to swoop and dive over its 200km of clear water, fed from rushing streams off the Connemara mountains, giving life to its foreshore and islands where people have lived since the dawn of time, fishing its shallows and its dark deeps; and where monks sought an earthly haven for prayer and solitude.