Galway in Days Gone By
Galway In Days Gone By
1916
Naked and cold patients
At the meeting of Ballinasloe Asylum Committee, the report of the lunacy inspectors on the recent inspection of the institution was read. It stated that patients in some of the male and female divisions were found huddled together, practically naked, in a cold ward, lying on straw, and the conditions of things was scandalous.
They did not think that in any civilised country such a condition existed as they found in the wards visited. The patients were in a most deplorable condition. It was hard to realise that poor creatures who could neither speak or act for themselves would be left in such a manner.
Mr Millar: Who is responsible for this awful state of affairs?
The Clerk said that Dr. Kirwan had asked him to point out to the Committee that it was impossible to have patients done up in the form the inspectors required, as these patients were exceedingly bad, and the heading apparatus would be put in as soon as possible after the war.
Dr English: I am very sorry to have to admit that the report is true, and that things are as they found them. I was not aware that the patients were treated in the position stated and as has been reported, and I had no reason to believe that the patients were treated in such a manner.
I want to make it perfectly plain, clear, and above board, that if they were in the condition they were found in. I know nothing about it, and that my attention was never drawn to it.
Lloyd George’s ignorance
The amazing ignorance recently displayed by Mr. Lloyd George in the matter of coal-raising in Ireland affords a significant commentary on the interest which English Cabinet Ministers devote to the internal affairs of John Bull’s other island.
He confessed in his reply to the representative Irish deputation that interviewed him regarding the making of munitions in this country that he did not know that any coal was raised in Ireland.
1941
Huge turf scheme
A call to private turbary owners, turf societies, commercial organisations and every other available agency to co-operate in the production of turf on a scale never before contemplated, was issued by Mr. Hugo Flinn, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, when he addressed the Galway County Council on Saturday on what he described as a work of real and urgent national necessity.
Unless over 6,000,000 tons of turf were cut this season, he said, there would be cold hearths and empty grates next winter. He guaranteed that every sod of turf of reasonable quality would find a market.
Airman’s body found
On Tuesday morning, the headless body of an airman was washed up on the strand near Oranmore, a discovery which was immediately reported to the local Gardaí.
Dressed in a shirt, collar and tie, a torn pullover, pants and two pairs of socks, the body was that of a sergeant and would appear to have been in the water for several weeks.
Mr. Michael J. Allen, solicitor, Coroner for West Galway, viewed the remains in the afternoon and decided that, under the new regulations, no inquest would be held.
On Tuesday night, the remains were coffined and interred in the Oranmore Catholic Cemetery. It is thought that the dead soldier was one of a crew of the R.A.F. bomber which recently crashed in Galway Bay.
High death toll
For two days after the bombing of Belfast on Tuesday night, special trains continued to arrive in Dublin laden with refugees from the stricken city. Thousands of men, women and children rendered homeless by the raid found sanctuary and every possible help in the Irish capital. In some cases, mothers carried dead babies in their arms.
The dreadful visitation has brought mourning to more than one home in Galway City and County.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
1921
Grim legacy
“What did we get from the Government in the Famine?” asked the Most Rev. Dr. Duggan. And the answer was, “The Poorhouses.” They came as a legacy of these grim years, a miserable palliative instead of a radical cure.
When 1845 opened, there were 114 of them throughout Ireland, and impoverished ratepayers had to pay for their upkeep. Their erection was, indeed, in some measure, instituted as a relief work.
The famine had swept over the land, leaving us the most tragic chapters in our history. Grim, black death in a country where there was plenty, if only it had been efficiently distributed, and kept for the hapless people at home.
The Irish Poor Law was rooted in misery, and continued throughout all these years as a cumbersome degradation, designed for the encouragement of the mendicant and the wastrel, to crush the last vestige of self-respect from those whom it once caught within its toils.
With the exception of the admirable boarding-out systems instituted by some of our more humane boards – notably Galway Guardians, whose clerk took a keen personal interest in making some of his charges into good citizens – we know no instance in which the vicious Poor Laws as operated in Ireland did anything but harm.
They ground down the ratepayers; they did not serve the poor in any measure commensurate with the expenditure involved in an army of officials, an array of buildings that badged with poverty one of the finest agricultural countries in the world.
Unions amalgamated
On the motion of Dr. Walsh, Galway Co. Council at its quarterly meeting on Saturday finally adopted a scheme for “the amalgamation of the county unions” – in reality, for doing away with the unions altogether as such.
The scheme under which the Poor Laws of the country will be administered on an entirely new basis, will be as follows: One central hospital for Galway with motor ambulances; one central home for the old and infirm in Tuam or Loughrea; children to be sent to an institution for which one workhouse may be used; unmarried mothers to be divided into two classes – first offenders to be dealt with in the same institution as the children and old offenders to be sent to the Magdalen Asylum; insane and epileptics to be put in a county home at present until they can be specially dealt with.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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1921
Tragedy and sorrow
Last winter was one of the blackest that Ireland has experienced in her long and chequered history. Men of sincere goodwill in all parties hope that we shall never witness its like again.
It has left the inevitable aftermath of tragedy, sorrow, suffering and present distress. It is the duty of all to help soften the bitterness of tragedy and sorrow, to alleviate suffering, to obviate present or future distress.
In the performance of this duty, no prejudice, no argument, no excuse can hold back the hand of charity, for it is a duty dictated by the laws of Christianity, sanctified by the kinship of common humanity since the world began.
“The White Cross”, we are told in the report of the delegation from the American Committee on Irish Relief, “makes appeal not in the name of any section of the people, but in the name of humanity. No political distinctions exist in suffering, and none must exist in relief. The men and women who constitute the Irish White Cross think differently on many thinks; they are united by the bond of charity”.
Risky business
We have, this year, a striking example of what a risky business our store cattle and sheep trade is. Many of our small farmers and farmers’ sons who have taken grazing during the past year or two have lost not only their savings of the war years but some of their capital.
The system most likely to give stability to farming in Co. Galway is one which the grazing of store cattle and sheep must give pride of place to the production of home-grown food.
The risk of loss on tillage farming can be controlled, to some extent, by sowing a variety of crops and by the careful selection of seeds and manures. A collection of kales and cabbages for stock feeding was an interesting feature of the County Committee’s educational exhibit at Ballinasloe Show.
Many of the varieties staged are little known or cultivated in this country, which seems extraordinary when we consider their many advantages.
Thousand-headed Kale, Drumhead, Flat Dutch and Savoy cabbages could supplement, or take the place of, the turnip crop in many districts where disease is prevalent, or where the land is otherwise unsuitable for the growth of roots.
It is only by the adoption of a system of mixed farming where sufficient food is grown for the number of stock on hands that steady prices can be obtained.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
1921
Clocks falling back
Summer Time, as designed by statute of the British House of Commons, will end at 3 a.m. on the morning of Monday next, October 3. Thus, whilst the people sleep, time will be arrested, the clock will be thrown back an hour.
Time will, of course, move on its inexorable way quite irrespective of how man may mark its passage. Where the Summer Time has been kept, however, the hands of clocks and watches will be put back an hour on the Sunday night.
From the mechanical point of view, it is safer to put them forward eleven hours, or to stop them for an hour, as it is not good for the clocks or watches that the hands should be moved backwards.
In the county districts Summer Time was scarcely kept at all. The farmer was against it for two reasons: under Summer Time the world was not “aired” at the hour he or his hands would customarily start work, and he found that his workmen began by Winter Time but always stopped according to Summer Time!
Thus he lost a clear two hours. But there can be no doubt that in the towns and to all who work long hours in office, factory or shop, the institution of long summer evenings was a blessing; nor was the saving in artificial light to be despised.
Indeed, Summer Time brings more light to humanity, and enables us to live at smaller cost – facts which we hope the Irish legislature will not lose sight of next summer.
1946
Motorists stranded
Many motorists in Connemara were “caught napping” during the week-end when all the petrol pumps in the area went suddenly dry. Cars which set out on long journeys in the hope of replenishing petrol supplies en route were unable to return to their bases, and motorists stranded on the roadside were quite a common spectacle on Sunday.
For a long time past, motorists complain bitterly of the practice of some garage owners in reserving petrol supplies “for customers only.” Customers are those who lodge their coupons with the garage owner at the beginning of the month. This means that the garage owner’s licensed petrol pump becomes merely a storage tank for the convenience of a limited number of local motorists.
If the system is not illegal it ought to be so, and it certainly calls for investigation by the Department of Supplies.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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