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Last month Galway Diary explored the sham legend that grew around the so-called ‘Empty frame’ on the wall of the Lynch’s Chapel, or Lady’s chapel, in the historic St Nicholas’ Collegiate church. The late Canon George Quinn pronounced that this was the very frame in which the Bishop of Clonfert, Walter Lynch’s sacred icon of the Madonna and Child once hung, before he was forced to flee just before the arrival of Cromwell’s soldiers in April 1652.

Week II

An important event occurred 360 years ago this week, which changed the fortunes of Galway town forever.

A day trip to Inishbofin Island is planned for Sunday June 27 departing at 10am from Westport Tourist Office.

A second storming party under Colonel Hewson was also beaten back. Wounded and dying men lay heaped on both sides of the breach in the wall. Body parts were scattered everywhere.

The effects of the fighting on Kilkenny were devastating. Apart from the human cost, many important buildings bore the brunt of the siege and the cruel occupation that followed it. St Patrick’s Church, from which the opening barrages of cannon-fire had rained down on the city, was completely obliterated. Today not a trace of the building remains.

OLIVER CROMWELL is a hugely divisive figure. In Ireland his opinion poll ratings remain even lower than those of soon-to-be-former president George W Bush and only slightly higher than those of that famous Austrian advocate of a very different type of European unity: the late Adolf Hitler.