Search Results for 'Walter Macken'

SINCE 1900 Galway has produced a number of quality children’s authors, beginning with Pádraic Ó Conaire on his M'Asal Beag Dubh, and continuing with Eilis Dillon's The Lost Island and Island of the Horses; Walter Macken's Flight of the Doves and The Island of the Great Yellow Ox, and, of course, Pat O’Shea from Bohermore, with her now classic The Hounds of The Morrigan.

WALTER MACKEN, one of Galway’s most famous writers, was born 100 years ago this May, and An Taibhdhearc and Galway’s West End community will hold commemorative events.

Cathy Belton has excelled at playing a a slightly scary TV character in the form of Red Rock’s Patricia Hennessy so one could be forgiven for thinking the Galway woman might resemble the ice-queen in real life. However the charming, softly spoken, actress could not be more different to the villainous Hennessy matriarch.

Cathy Belton has excelled at playing a a slightly scary TV character in the form of Red Rock’s Patricia Hennessy so one could be forgiven for thinking the Galway woman might resemble the ice-queen in real life. However the charming, softly spoken, actress could not be more different to the villainous Hennessy matriarch.

DECEMBER 30, and as 2014 makes its valedictory bow, and takes its final curtain call, before tomorrow exiting the stage - to appreciative applause, naturally - while bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 2015 waits in the wings for its turn in the limelight.

The Toft family were associated with Eyre Square for many years since 1883 when they first brought a carnival there.

Galway Diary received the following statement from Adrian Martyn (great-great-great grandnephew of Peter Doherty, senior), who was shot dead at Carrigan, near Craughwell village on the night of November 2 1881. I am pleased to carry Adrian’s clarification:

One hundred and ninety five years ago this week, the Presentation Sisters opened their convent on Presentation Road, on March 25 1819 to be precise. Some years before that, Doctor ffrench, the warden of Galway, went to Kilkenny to ask the sisters there if they could found a convent here. He had a fund for the purpose, and so, on October 27 1815, three sisters arrived to a house in Kirwan’s Lane. This building was not large enough for them and the 30 girls of the school which had been handed over to them by a committee of ladies, so they moved into a larger house on Eyre Square where they remained for three years.

For three years after the opening of the Gate Theatre in Dublin Mícheál MacLiammóir continued to work for An Taibhdhearc. He travelled to Galway as often as three times a week. Despite the Gate's rave reviews for its first play Peer Gynt, for which Mícheál designed its 'symbolic' scenery, money was slow to come in. Mícheál needed the salary that An Taibhdhearc offered. The Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe (who was soon to take over the running of the Abbey Theatre), and who had taken such interest in the fledgling Galway project, urged its directors to offer MacLiammóir full-time employment. But MacLiammóir felt that his destiny was in Dublin. The Gate opened later in 1928, the same year as An Taibhdhearc, offering Dublin audiences the best of European and American theatre, and rapidly becoming a venue for a new wave of talented Irish writers.

As we approach the centenary of Walter Macken’s birth next year the opportunity arises for a creative innovative theatrical person to fill the role that he once held as Artistic Director of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe.