Today (Thursday) marks the 50th anniversary of a murder in the city, carried out by a gang with links to the IRA, which sent shockwaves through Galway.

On August 15, 1974, Jerome O’Connor from Terryland was shot in a botched robbery outside AIB in Lynch’s Castle – an unprecedented killing in a city where crimes such as this were, and continue to be, mercifully rare.

The 52-year-old Sisk Construction employee had been sent to the bank with a colleague to collect the weekly wages – just over £1,500 in cash.

His colleague, Mick Fleming, waited in the car as Jerome went into the bank and when he emerged, he was confronted by two men – one of them holding a sawn-off shot gun.

When they attempted to pull the bag of cash from the wages clerk’s grip, he resisted and the gun went off in a struggle.

The Connacht Tribune from that date, which was pulled off the printing press to include the story on the front page, reported that “Mr O’Connor was shot at point-blank range”.

Under the headline, “Wages clerk murdered in city hold-up”, the shocking details of what had unfolded were outlined.

“There was a horrific scene in the aftermath of the murder. A large pool of blood lay on the roadway immediately outside the entrance of the Allied Irish Bank office in the Lynch Castle.

“A garda squad car sealed off the traffic and detectives drew a chalk mark outlining the position of the dead man on the roadway,” states the newspaper report which goes on to detail how all exits from the city were sealed off by gardaí in the hunt for the assailants.

The Tribune from the following week details the “relentless” manhunt which led to the detention of ten suspects.

Caption: Noreen O’Connor holds a picture of herself and her husband Jerome on their wedding day in 1967. Photo: Ray Ryan

Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.