50th Anniversary of Galway’s biggest disaster

Date Published: 17-Aug-2007

The 50th anniversary of the KLM disaster, when 99 passengers lost their lives as an airliner crashed into the sea off the Galway coast, is to be commemorated in the city next Summer.

Councillor John Mulholland is to ask Galway City Council to commemorate the air crash that happened on August 14, 1958. The KLM aircraft, carrying 91 passengers and a crew of eight, had left Shannon Airport on the second leg of a transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to New York when it plunged into the ocean 100 miles west of Galway Bay.

Twenty five unidentified bodies from the air crash site in the ocean were buried in a number of graves in the New Cemetery. The graves have one headstone, which was erected at the time by Galway Corporation.

In fact, at the time the whole city was in mourning at what was the biggest disaster experienced locally — many Americans and Canadians came to Galway to claim the bodies of their dead relatives.

This week, Cllr. Mulholland, who was…..