Galway Ireland Quotes

Up to this point, my whole life had been pretty ordinary. And here I was, feeling like I’d stepped into a movie, pretending to be something I wasn’t. And these people with whom I interacted, these characters in my movie, were believing it. June and Mark actually thought I was Meghan O’Connell from Galway, Ireland. I let out a big laugh.

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me.

I’d like to see some identification,” growled the inspector. I fully expected Barrons to toss O’Duffy from the shop on his ear. He had no legal compulsion to comply and Barrons doesn’t suffer fools lightly. In fact, he doesn’t suffer them at all, except me, and that’s only because he needs me to help him find the Sinsar Dubh. Not that I’m a fool. If I’ve been guilty of anything, it’s having the blithely sunny disposition of someone who enjoyed a happy childhood, loving parents, and long summers of lazy-paddling ceiling fans and small-town drama in the Deep South which-while it’s great—doesn’t do a thing to prepare you for live beyond that. Barrons gave the inspector a wolfish smile. “Certainly.” He removed a wallet from the inner pocket of his suit. He held it out but didn’t let go. “And yours, Inspector.” O’Duffy’s jaw tightened but he complied. As the men swapped identifications, I sidled closer to O’Duffy so I could peer into Barrons’ wallet. Would wonders never cease? Just like a real person, he had a driver’s license. Hair: black. Eyes: brown. Height: 6’3”. Weight: 245. His birthday—was he kidding?—Halloween. He was thirty-one years old and his middle initial was Z. I doubted he was an organ donor. “You’ve a box in Galway as your address, Mr. Barrons. Is that where you were born?” I’d once asked Barrons about his lineage, he’d told me Pict and Basque. Galway was in Ireland, a few hours west of Dublin. “No.” “Where?” “Scotland.” “You don’t sound Scottish.” “You don’t sound Irish. Yet here you are, policing Ireland. But then the English have been trying to cram their laws down their neighbors’ throats for centuries, haven’t they, Inspector?” O’Duffy had an eye tic. I hadn’t noticed it before. “How long have you been in Dublin?” “A few years. You?” “I’m the one asking the questions.” “Only because I’m standing here letting you.” “I can take you down to the station. Would you prefer that?” “Try.” The one word dared the Garda to try, by fair means or foul. The accompanying smile guaranteed failure. I wondered what he’d do if the inspector attempted it. My inscrutable host seems to possess a bottomless bag of tricks. O’Duffy held Barrons’ gaze longer than I expected him to. I wanted to tell him there was no shame in looking away. Barrons has something the rest of us don’t have. I don’t know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we’re standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultural veneer, there’s something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn’t want to. It likes it there.

from the great heart and centre of the Irish kingdom, five great arteries or roads radiated from Tara to the various parts of the country — the Slighe Cualann, which ran toward the present County Wicklow; the Slighe Mor, the great Western road, which ran via Dublin to Galway; the Slighe Asail which ran near the present Mullingar; the Slighe Dala which ran Southwest; and the Slighe Midluachra, the Northern road. Great, noble and beautiful truly was our Tara of the Kings.[17]

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation.

It had been two years since we left our home on the west coast of Ireland. Life was hard there, too; our da held and lost a string of jobs, none of which were enough to support us. We lived in a tiny unheated house made of stone in a small village in County Galway called Kinvara. People all around us were fleeing to America: we heard tales of oranges the size of baking potatoes; fields of grain waving under sunny skies; clean, dry timber houses with indoor plumbing and electricity. Jobs as plentiful as the fruit on the trees. As one final act of kindness toward us—or perhaps to rid themselves of the nuisance of constant worry—Da’s parents and sisters scraped together the money for ocean passage for our family of five, and on a warm spring day we boarded the Agnes Pauline, bound for Ellis Island.

In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. There has been handed down a poetical account of this great battle — a story that O’Curry says can hardly be less than fourteen hundred years old — which is very interesting, and wherein we get some quaint glimpses of ancient Irish ethics of war (for even in the most highly imaginative tale, the poets and seanachies of all times, unconsciously reflect the manners of their own age, or of ages just passed).

How mundane those moments were at the time, compared to how precious the memories were now.

GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO “The world was a different place, once,” Niall says into the microphone. “Once there were creatures in the sea so miraculous they seemed straight out of fantasy. There were things that loped across plains or slithered through tall grass, things that leaped from the boughs of trees, which were plentiful, too. Once there were glorious winged beasts that roamed the sky-world, and now they are going.” He stops and looks for my face in the lecture hall. “They aren’t going,” he corrects himself. “They are being violently and indiscriminately slaughtered by our indifference. It has been decided by our leaders that economic growth is more important. That the extinction crisis is an acceptable trade for their greed.” He said it’s hard, sometimes, to finish. The bile rises in his throat and he could break the lectern beneath his hands, overcome with a profound sense of loathing for what we are, all of us, and the poison of our species. He called himself a hypocrite for always talking, never doing, and he said he hates himself as much as anyone, he’s as much a perpetrator, a consumer living in wealth and privilege and wanting more and more and more.

My mother told me a million times that Ireland and the Irish people were special, and that the O'Cadhain family in particular was the most blessed of all because it had been imposed upon without cease since the dawn it sprung up in Galway. For centuries they had been in training to have nothing, so everything was more or less working perfectly according to God's plan.

That part of west that was full of rocks and full up with sadness in the little sacks grown men develop under their eyes, the accumulation of tears they don't cry as they walk along, shut down, like an out-of-season seaside café.

We burned there between the rails of the bed, combusting with such cosmic force and heat that the whole of the room, the hospital, the entire city of Galway, and the rest of the world dropped away and spun out of existence.

A Note on the Text This is a work of fiction based in no part on any individual or individuals. Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year, the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam home, in County Galway. These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013. Acknowledgements