Search Results for 'Noel Wilkins'

In 1822, the harbour of Galway was very defective with only one small dock, now known as ‘the mud dock’, and two small jetties on the Claddagh shore. The outflow of the river was too great to allow sailing boats to enter safely at low tide. They had to wait outside on the roads for high tide, and even then, the entry could be tricky when the wind was strong. The merchants of Galway petitioned the Lord Lieutenant in 1820 to make improvements and he forwarded their request to Nimmo.

The west of Ireland’s annual Architecture at the Edge festival will include recognition of a high-profile Galway city architect who passed away suddenly in 2021.

Hands up those of us who did Latin in school?.....three? five? ..OK 12 of us. I know Latin is still sold to some young students as the key to understanding European culture and heritage. Old school masters argue that Latin is better for you than Sudoku, better, even, that The Irish Times Crosaire crossword. Yet when I came across my old Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, I was filled with an old familiar dread. There it all was, the boring conjunctions of verbs, and the declensions of nouns; all the miserable rules of grammar and syntax, possibly the driest book ever created, and not a joke between its covers.

Our illustration today is of the inner part of Galway Bay and shows the piers and harbours therein. It is one of the images in a new book entitled Humble Works for Humble People written by Noel Wilkins, a retired professor of zoology who has a number of titles to his name already, many of them dealing with County Galway. This book explores the history of the fishery piers and harbours of County Galway and north Clare. It is a scholarly but eminently readable testament to these piers as feats of engineering, but it also gives us a wonderful account of the human aspect that shadowed their construction, and finally it describes beautifully the maritime activities that gave life to the west coast — kelp making, fishing, turf distribution, and sea-borne trade.

St Michael’s Club was formed in 1956 after Galway won the All-Ireland football final. The first AGM was held in Tom Connolly’s house in Lower Shantalla Road, and they played their first game in 1957. Among those who founded the club were Pa Boyle (whose brainchild it was), Mick O’Toole, John Duignan, Mick Higgins, Liam Cunningham, and Sergeant O’Toole. They started as a dual club, but after a few years they concentrated solely on football.