Search Results for 'Pearse'

Linley MacKenzie

As a direct consequence of the death of three National Army soldiers during a botched raid on the barracks in Headford on Sunday April 8 1923, six anti-Treaty young men, already in Galway jail, were selected for immediate execution. They had been arrested during a raid on their training camp in the Currandulla area six weeks earlier.

Patrick McDonagh from Galway was born in 1817 and married Sarah Cooney. They had a son Michael who married Peggy Wallace in 1870, and they in turn had a son Colman in 1875. He had a habit of whispering in people's ears and so became known as ‘Cogar’. In 1902, he moved from Carraroe to Galway and rented stores at the back of the Spanish Arch from Peter Greene. From there, he began to sell coal, carrying it on a horse and cart.

Pádraig Pearse’s first visit to Connemara was in 1903, when he was 24 years of age. He was sent there by Conrad na Gaeilge, a nation-wide Irish language movement, then gaining momentum year after year, to examine a group of young teachers from the Ros Muc area, to see if they were fit to teach Irish. When this young romantic man, already with an image of an ‘Irish Ireland’ in his mind, stepped from the train at Maam Cross station, he had a life-changing realisation that this was ‘a little Gaelic kingdom of its own’.

‘How did the Germans receive our plans? With polite incredulity’…..wrote Liam Ó Briain, the Galway professor who took part in the 1916 Rising, ‘ignorant of Ireland they viewed us as forlorn visionaries, and even doubted whether we would be rash enough to challenge the armed might of England’.

Tomás Bán Concannon was born on Inis Meáin 150 years ago on November 16, 1870, the son of Páidin Concannon and Annie Faherty. He was called ‘bán’ because of his blond hair and to differentiate him from other neighbours of the same name. He was educated on the island and, unusually for an islander, in the Monastery School in Galway. When he was 15 his brother brought him to America where he went to a number of colleges and attended Eastman College in New York where he graduated with an MA in accountancy. He spent some time working in a business selling rubber stamps, then in his brother’s vineyard in California, and he later set up a business in Mexico. It was there he came across a journal called Gaodhal published by Conradh na Gaeilge in the US. So he learned to read and write in Irish in Mexico.

AFTER SPENDING the last few weeks looking through streaming services from abroad, like Netflix and Amazon, I spent the last week trying to limit my content to local services. TG4 as we all know is a brilliant local resource, but maybe you have not seen the quality content they have in their website for free?