Search Results for 'Tawin Island'

In his interesting biography of Éamon de Valera,* Diarmuid Ferriter wrote that in December 2000 gardaí seized 24 love letters from de Valera to his young wife Sinéad, which were being advertised for auction by Mealy’s of Castlecomer. It was believed that the letters were stolen in the mid 1970s from the de Valera family home. The owners who had bought them in the UK some years previously in an effort to ensure their return to Ireland, were unaware that they were stolen.

The praise lavished on Dr Séamus Ó Beirn by the Tuam Herald (February 22 1908), for his lectures and lantern slides on the scourge of tuberculosis in Connemara, was justified. The journalist said he is ‘a plain dispensary doctor whose soul is aflame with Christian charity, and the love of his native tongue’.

An Taibhdhearc, Ireland’s only Irish language theatre, situated in Middle Street, the very heart of Galway, grew out of a conversation between two remarkable men, Professor Liam Ó Briain and Dr Séamus Ó Beirn.* Both men, passionate Irish speakers, believed that a lively Irish language theatre would promote Irish in an imaginative way.

It is no coincidence that the Regional (now the University College) Hospital and Merlin Park opened almost simultaneously in the mid 1950s. The Old Central Hospital, which had opened in 1922, became unfit for purpose, mainly due to overcrowding, and the difficulty accommodating long stay tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis, or TB, was, in the early decades of the 20th century, at epidemic proporations. The same year that the Central Hospital opened, the same year as the foundation of our State, there were 4,614 deaths from TB; 611 were children under 15 years.

In the year 1132, the King of Munster besieged Dún Bun na Gaillimhe (the fortification at the mouth of Galway) on Mutton Island and and destroyed the castle. There is a reference in the year 1190 to Lismacuan, ‘The Fort on the Mouth of the Harbour’. In 1641 an order was made that the lands of Mutton Island were to be made use of as commonage for the inhabitants of Galway.