Search Results for 'Joe Costelloe'

It is fairly certain that rugby football was being played in Galway before the formation of the IRFU, but the lack of surviving minutes of meetings or records makes it difficult to pinpoint the actual beginnings of some clubs. We know that in 1886 there were four clubs in existence, Queen’s College (now UG), The Grammar School, Galway Town, and Old Galwegians. These latter two clubs amalgamated in the 1909/10 season and called themselves Galway Town. They were a successful club. World War I and its aftermath ruled out competitive rugby but in the resumption, in 1921/22 they again won the senior cup and then, for some reason, decided to change the name again, this time to Galwegians RFC.

This 1948 photograph was taken from the old RIC barracks which was opposite the Banba Hotel . The bit of a wall you can see in the immediate foreground was part of ‘The Lazy Wall’. There was a concrete seat running along the other side of this wall and it was there people known as the ‘Fámairí’ used to congregate, people mostly from farming families. When they had the harvest in, they would come to Salthill on holiday and often meet with the same people as last year. They would sit here and gossip, smoke their dúidíns and sometimes paddle in the sea beside them.

Galway City and County gaols were built at the beginning of the 19th century on a large site which took up most of Nuns Island. Construction was conditional on a right of way, the road all around the walls, also being built. James Hardiman, the historian, described it as follows: “The Prison …. Is built in the form of a crescent …. The interior of which is divided into eight wards ….. separated by walls which form so many radii of a circle, and, terminating in the rear of the governor’s house, bringing the whole range within many of his windows, by which means he can, at a single glance, survey the entire.”

It was Leonard Martin’s idea to bring Santa Claus to Galway for the first time when he introduced him to his shop in Mainguard Street. It was such a novelty that the mayor, Joe Costelloe, came formally to the shop to welcome Santa and shake his hand. Leonard Martin’s shop (where St Anthony’s Credit Union is today) opened in 1941. For most of the year it was largely a hardware shop but at Christmas it became a toyshop exclusively. The man who played Santa Claus was a war veteran named Jack Kerr.