Search Results for 'Peggy Carty'

It has to be the year of the Shark, that’s John ‘Shark’ Hanlon from County Carlow. He bought a horse called Hewick. He didn’t pay dearly for it (not even a thousand euro) and then won the Galway Plate last summer. He added another win at Sandown, and between the two he pocketed half a million euro. Not bad for a year’s work. But just last October he won the American Grand National at Fair Hills in New Jersey with a $160,000 dollar first prize. Now he is 33/1 to take the Cheltenham Gold Cup in March. D’ya think, maybe.

It was Manchester airport, March 2008, and the flight to Galway had been delayed. Disgruntled passengers wandered through the departures terminal, concerned that Galway Airport might be closed by the time their plane landed. The complaints grew louder with the announcement of a further two hour delay. ‘All intending passengers’ were impatient and fed up. Well, almost all. There was one exception. In the midst of the unhappy throng, there was one person who would have more reason than most to complain and bemoan their predicament. Accompanied by her mother, Aileen, was a young Clarinbridge girl, who was returning home having just had re-construction surgery performed on her foot in a hospital in Sheffield. This was another staging post in what had been a series of operations carried out over a number of years in the English city. Amidst the doom and gloom of the delayed passengers, she stood out like a beacon of light. Smiling, friendly, warm and chatty, welcome to Katie O’Brien. She was twelve years of age.

One of Galway’s best known businessmen Dermot Murray, Ard Aoibhinn, Dalysfort Road, died peacefully at University College Hospital last Friday.

When you look back at the recent history of Galway, and when I say recent, I mean the last forty or fifty years, you see that the progression of the city is built around a group of individuals in all spheres, political, cultural, musical and otherwise, who somehow contributed to this conviction of Galway as being a place apart.