Search Results for 'Old Tuam Society'

Well known Tuam historian Catherine Corless, who was instrumental in discovering the death and burial of hundreds of children at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, has been honoured with the Irish Red Cross Lifetime Achievement Award.

A new book which chronicles the revolutionary decade in North Galway will be launched in Tuam next month. Written by local GP Dr. Jarlath Deignan who is a member of the Old Tuam Society, the book discusses the various episodes that occurred during the pursuit of Irish freedom from a local perspective, including the Great War, Easter 1916, the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Civil War.

A survivor group has called on Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone to launch an inquest into the deaths of children at the mass grave of the Tuam Baby and Mother Home.

It is not surprising that any child with imagination, and an interest in the sea, would spend time at the city’s harbour watching the ships come and go, and the men who worked there as they talked and unloaded fish or cargo. As a child Kathleen Curran, once the home chores were done, would run down the back paths from her home on College Road and along Lough Atalia to the docks. ‘There she would stand and gaze in wonder at the ships, boats and trawlers, hookers and gleoteóigs tied up or coming and going about their business.’

Kathleen B Curran, who began working for the Galway Harbour Board after she left school, would rise spectacularly through the ranks to become the combined Harbour Master and secretary to the Port Authority (an unheard of position for a woman in Ireland). She was intimately involved in all of the major events which the harbour witnessed during the latter part of the last century. But I am sure she took particular pleasure, as an Irish language enthusiast and a great admirer of the poet WB Yeats, when Galway was picked out to play a role in the great poet’s funeral.

Shortly before midnight on February 18 1946, the cargo ship The Moyalla steamed into Galway Bay. It was a foggy night. The Galway pilot, Coleman Flaherty was watching the approach of the ship from the bothareen at Barna waiting for the ship to signal for a pilot. Unusually she steamed along without requesting any.

When Sheron Boyle was researching her family’s history she often wondered why her grandmother Margaret (nee Martin), who had emigrated to America at 20 years of age, and who seemed to be happy and settled, living close to her relatives who had gone before her, suddenly returned to her farmstead near Rockfort in Irishtown, Co Mayo.

Seamus Carter was a fluent Irish speaker who was a member of the Gaelic League since its inception. He was the secretary of the Oireachtas when it was held in Galway in 1913, the famous photograph of which hangs in the Town Hall.