Father Griffin Road is a relatively new road. It was built in the early 1930s. Fr Griffin was a young priest who was abducted, tortured and killed by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence and he was an obvious choice when it came to naming the road.
Much of the land we see in our photograph was described in 1681 as “The wett piece of ground on the highway to Kilcorkey”. The land behind the Technical School was later known as "Feeney’s Marsh” and became part of the Colohan Estate. The Colohans lived in a large house at the Crescent, and their land extended all the way to the sea. Before that, the main thoroughfare was Munster Avenue which connected to Trimm’s Lane (now Whitestrand ) and went from William Street West to Grattan Road. The swampy ground to the rear of the Technical School was known locally as Tom Mannin’s Bog.
Part of the area was used as a dump. In 1938, after Dr O’Beirne brought to public attention the fact that it was the cause of some disease, the then minister convinced the Corporation to expend £50 on having the dump put into a sanitary condition. At the time, there was also flooding reported at the back of Curley’s premises. So this part of Galway underwent major changes around this time — the photograph was taken from the top of the newly built Technical School, the road was new, and all of the houses on the right of the picture were also newly built as part of the scheme to replace all of the thatched cottages in the Claddagh with modern housing.
About this time also, at the end of 1932, Michael O’Flaherty moved his service station to Fr Griffin Road to the area behind where this photograph was taken. Around the same time, James and Maghréad Ó Broin opened their grocery shop. Munster Lane was all thatched cottages with no facilities of any kind; they were demolished around 1948 by the Corporation and two-storey houses built.
The space between the cottages and the bridge was used in 1948 to house the statue of Fr Tom Burke made by the sculptor John Kavanagh.
The white building we see on the left of our image was the British Legion Club, and our second photograph is an interesting image of the doorway as the British Legion sign was still over the door while the building was used by An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil, two sworn enemies using the same building. The FCA probably used it for drilling purposes, but it also had snooker and table tennis tables and was often used by locals. Mike Coen worked as a caretaker there and was a well-known character. A man called O’Reilly, who lived on Quay Street, where Nora Crúbs was later, was the British Legion representative in Galway.
