Kevin McDonald Plumbing and Central Heating Engineer

13/11/2023

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22/10/2023

Nora Barnacle was born in 1884 at Galway City workhouse, the second child of Thomas and Annie Barnacle.

At a young age, she was sent to stay with her grandmother, although later she returned to live at a house in Bowling Green in the city with her mother and six siblings.

Nora was known for being impulsive and carefree and enjoyed flouting convention, occasionally walking around Galway dressed as a man.

She moved to Dublin in 1904 where she worked as a maid in Finn's Hotel on Nassau Street.

It was at this point that she caught the attention of an aspiring author named James Joyce.

Later that year, after a whirlwind romance, the pair eloped to Switzerland. They lived together thereafter and had two children, although they did not marry until 1931.

It appears that James Joyce visited his wife's home county of Galway just twice.

On the second occasion in 1912, he spent several weeks and attended the Galway Races, cycled to a graveyard in Oughterard, sailed to Inishmore and possibly went as far as the Marconi Station near Clifden.

Joyce was clearly inspired by his visit to the west.

His poem 'She weeps over Rahoon' is written about the cemetery in Galway while Joyce also wrote two essays on the county.

He also published an article on his namesake, Myles Joyce, hanged unjustly for a murder he did not commit at Maamtrasna in 1882.

Joyce and Barnacle moved around Europe regularly over the coming years and Nora became a multi-linguist.

She also worked various jobs, including as a laundress, to support her husband, whose career as a writer took some years to take off.

Nora was less than impressed with Joyce’s complicated writing style, and later said she had never read Ulysses, his most famous book.

Nevertheless, she was a superb muse and Joyce based many of his most famous characters, including Molly Bloom, on his wife.

Joyce eventually found literary success, giving Nora much of the credit for her support.

James Joyce died in 1941, having not returned to Ireland since his sojourn to Galway in 1912.

His relationship with his homeland was strained.

“Do you know what Ireland is? Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” Stephen Dedalus, a character in Joyce's 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man' says, perhaps mirroring Joyce's own view of the country.

Nora Barnacle outlived her husband by a decade, dying in Switzerland in 1951.

Today, there is a little museum in Galway City, Nora Barnacle House, dedicated to her life and that of her husband.

08/08/2023

Geraldine Plunkett gave this devastating critique of the methods of the Black and Tans in Galway in the space of a few weeks in 1920 after the shootings of Seamus Quirke and Seán Mulvoy:

'As far as I could see, it would be with torture and floggings, but when I said this many people thought that it was not possible in that day and age. Certain Galway houses had practically daily raids—Joe Grehan’s, Donnelly’s, Fegan’s in Barna. Paddy McAvinue’s and Harry Shield’s were commandeered.

Four girls had their hair cut off, which was more of a tragedy then than it would be now. Tuam had a horrible night of raids and shootings.

A young man named Harry Burke was made crawl on his hands and knees up and down the Square in his nightshirt and when his knees were cut to pieces, a Black-and-Tan took him by the heels and made him finish it on his hands.

The Archbishop said that the destruction of life and property took on the hideous colours of hell.

There were lorries going about all night in Galway firing rifles.

Louis O’Dea’s office was bombed.

Pat Moylette’s shop looted.

The Bal (Ballinasloe House) in Salthill, owned by Joe Grehan, was looted while the Tans beat the shop boy.

The old malt house was searched for Michael Walsh. [He was later shot dead and dumped in the River Corrib]

The Republican outfitters was looted.

George Nicholls, Charlie Costelloe and Reynolds, foreman porter at the railway station, were arrested and the University College was raided.

Through October men were stripped and beaten, one an ex-RIC man. Humiliation and indignity were recognised as the objects of whippings, so men were usually stripped in front of crowds of women before being beaten with buckled belts or with specially made scourges.

There were terrors by the Black-and-Tans, the Auxies and the RIC in Barna and Moycullen, in Ardrahan and Labane, in Athenry and Gort, in Clifden and Oranmore.

Town halls were shot up, parochial halls burnt down by soldiers, houses and haggards burnt. Houses were looted and daubed with filth and parlours used as lavatories, men were shot up.

There were raids on shops—Keane’s, Powell’s, O’ Dea’s, Fegan’s. Moylette’s was raided and looted nearly every night—and Donnelly’s was set on fire three times in one night but each time the local Volunteers put out the fires.

J. J. Ward was ordered to provide drivers for looters’ cars and refused, so he had to drive Black-and-Tans about all night with a gun pressed to his back as they looted his friends’ houses.

The printers of the Galway Express newspaper were court-martialled.

After all this, the Connacht Tribune’s headline was “The Darkest Hour.’

Pictured is the village of Salthill, where Geraldine Plunkett Dillon lived at this time and where some of the above incidents took place. Courtesy NLI.

07/08/2023

Maam Valley, Co. Galway, 1913:

'She was a child of eight or ten, with dark hair and eyes, and slighter and frailer than the average Irish child; and she wore the characteristic garment fashioned from red flannel which all the poor children in Connemara wear.

She was bare-headed and barefooted; and her task was to drive the ragged little donkey out into the bog and fill the panniers with the bricks [sods], and drive it back again to the side of the road, and pile the turf there, ready for the cart which would take it away.

From the place where the turf was being cut to the roadside was at least a quarter of a mile, and how often that child had travelled that road that day I did not like to think. From the pile of turf that lay at the side of the road, it was evident she had not idled.'

Account by author Burton Egbert Stevenson.

04/02/2023

07/01/2023

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