Galway In Days Gone By

1918

A tragic lesson

At Tuam Petty Sessions on Monday, Mrs. Mullens, Tierboy-road, Tuam, was prosecuted in connection with the death of her six months’ old baby, which was recently burned. Mr. Comerford, D.I., did not press the charge on the ground that the unfortunate mother had already suffered sufficiently; and Thomas Kilcommins, who made a heroic attempt to rescue the baby by covering his head with a bag and creeping through the smoke to the burning cot in the kitchen, was complimented by the Resident Magistrate.

The saddest feature of tragedies such as these is that the lesson they afford to mothers is learnt in sorrow all too frequently. Fireguards should be made absolutely compulsory, not merely in law, but in fact.

In this respect, the law is more frequently honoured in the breach than in the observance, and in the result the children of the poor who live in crowded spaces are perpetually subjected to the dangers of fire.

No winter passes without the lives of innocent little ones being sacrificed to this neglect of a very elementary precaution. Now that special efforts are being put forward to preserve the health of the rising generation, and to stop the appalling infant mortality, this aspect of the question should receive special attention, and it should be an instruction to all who have the care of children to take every reasonable precaution against subjecting them unnecessarily to the dangers from fire.

Shipbuilding prospects

At the meeting of the Harbour Board on Tuesday, a letter was read from the Secretary to the Admiralty, in reply to the Board’s resolution calling attention to the facilities obtaining at Galway for the establishment of a shipbuilding yard, stating that the suggestions made by the Board had been noted, but there was at present no intention of extending the programme already approved for the establishment of national shipyards.

1943

Galway to be “bombed”

On Sunday next the warning siren will sound once again in Galway City and suburbs calling into action the members of the Civil Defence organisations – Local Security Force, Red Cross, Knights of Malta Ambulance, Fire-fighting service, Rescue Squads, Decontamination Squads and the Emergency Messenger Corps.

It will be the first mobilisation since the city has been divided into seven areas, each of which has its own assembly post under its own first aid station.

Under this arrangement, the members of the Local Security Force, instead of assembling at the L.S.F. Hall in Father Griffin Road or at the Eglinton Street Garda Station as heretofore, will muster at specified points in their respective districts.

The new arrangement should prove much more effective than the old. It has only one drawback – each of the seven areas requires at least fifty men to cope successfully with any war emergency in that district, and the entire strength of the Galway L.S.F. is barely a third of the requisite 350.

The extra men are urgently needed. So far from danger being past the peril to this country was never more imminent. Recent speeches of the Taoiseach and other prominent Irishmen of all parties should have made that quite clear even to our most determined optimists. The war is very far from being over, and we are a long way from being out of the wood. Apart from the young men in the L.D.F. there are hundreds who should be in the L.S.F. They must join before it is too late.

Sunday’s exercises will be based on the supposition that an air raid has taken place and that the city has been heavily bombed. In theory, buildings will have been demolished, fires started, and many persons killed, injured and trapped in ruins. Gas, water and electricity supplies will have been damaged. The telephone service will have been seriously interfered with. Roads will have been rendered impassable.

The Civil Defence forces will have to deal with all these matters as if they were “the real thing”, and the manner in which every section does its work will be watched carefully by the Umpires, who will include many army officers.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.