Search Results for 'Raftery'

The 70th All-Ireland Drama Festival concluded on Saturday night last, when, in the surrounds of the Radisson Blu Hotel Athlone, a gala awards ceremony was hosted in reflection of the participating amateur drama groups whom, for nine successive nights, entertained capacity audiences with their productions on stage at the Dean Crowe Theatre.

One of the attractions for WB Yeats, when he was considering buying the old Norman tower at Ballylee, was that the surrounding countryside echoed with stories of Antoine Ó Raifteiraí (1799-1835), the blind minstrel, who frequented the south Galway area.

‘My father had a sister Bríd. She was a beautiful woman when she was young. She was friendly with Jack (Seán) ‘ac Coscair, but her father never knew they had spoken a word to each other. It was Bríd who used to rake the fire and close the door each night. She raked the fire and closed the door that night, and she went to bed. She was only a short time asleep when a sinneán (strong gust of wind) came, and the door was blown in against that wall below. ‘Get up, Bríd,’ said her father, ‘and close the door!’

In 1990 – exactly 100 years after Sir William Gregory granted a 99-year lease on a section of land at Kiltartan Cross on which to build a schoolhouse – the Kiltartan Gregory Cultural Society was founded. Its aim was to restore the derelict red-brick schoolhouse, the very one commissioned by Sir William Gregory, and to preserve the history of Kiltartan for future generations. The next six years were spent doing just that.

AFTER TAKING the Irish indie-rock scene by storm with their debut release 'Mental Health', Galway's Slyrydes are back with new single 'Point Of View', and a show in the Róisín Dubh this month.

Described as a ‘turbulent priest’, and ‘the dominant public figure in Galway during the 1850s’, who was ‘a stubborn, abrasive, guileful and egotistical populist,’* Fr Peter Daly was the principle mover and shaker behind Galway’s drive to become the main transatlantic port for traffic to America in the 1850s. As chairman of both the Town Commissioners and the Harbour Board, he supported J O Lever’s Galway Line, which was to run three state-of-the-art steam-sailing ships between Galway and New York, from a grandiose harbour to be built off Furbo. Passengers from Britain, and all over Ireland, would be delivered to the terminal by train. It was to be the most comfortable, and shortest, route to America.