Galway In Days Gone By

1920

Get on or get out

It is refreshing to turn from the screeching headlines of our metropolitan Press to the isolated local efforts that are being made to get on with the real work of the Irish nation.

A meeting will be held in the Town Hall, Galway, at eight o’clock on Monday evening next for the purpose of forming an industrial association, and making arrangements for the holding of an industrial exhibition in the City.

May we say at the outset that we hope every class and section of the community will attend, not to criticise or sneer, or to give vent to these prejudices that form such a clog on the wheel of progress in our provincial life, but to take earnest counsel together and see if something cannot be done to put new life into our Western towns?

Twelve years ago, four years after the movement had been started in Cork that resulted in permanent benefit to Irish trade by the establishment of the Irish Trade Mark, a great exhibition and industrial conference was held in Galway.

The event was a notable success from the business, social and cultural aspect. If greater good did not come from it, the fault is to be found in local apathy and local divisions, which failed to grasp the splendid opportunity offered, and to extend the activities and broaden the scope of the Industrial Development Association in our midst.

To-day the need for some such effort is more than ever evident. It is said that the cities and towns, like individuals, become worn out: they reach a stage when all their progress becomes arrested, when as it were, they seem only to move backwards.

To stand on any point of vantage in Galway and view the surroundings is to be afforded tragic and melancholy evidence of the evil days upon which we have fallen.

All round about is a sea of dilapidated buildings, of derelict factories and worn-out roofs. It is, in very truth, a city of ruins.

The few redeeming features of modern effort pass almost unnoticed in pervading atmosphere of decay.

Former glories form a fitting study for the archaeologist, a saddening retrospect for the progressive business mind.

Yet water-power flows down to a glistening far-flung bay, with almost undreamt of possibilities. If steady hands and willing hearts were once found to arrest decay, all might be well in a very few years.

The very effort at progress is ennobling. It breathes a new spirit of enterprise, it restores confidence, it ensures expansion. The law of the physical world to-day is to “get on or get out”.

Surely, the citizens of Galway desire the old town to get on; and for that reason they will lend their whole-hearted assistance to any well-meant effort that is made to establish an industrial association that will not merely avail of every opportunity towards progress that comes our way bit that will seek out new opportunities and make the utmost use of them.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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