Galway In Days Gone By

1915

Storm rages

A mild sensation was created in Galway on Tuesday when the morning mail did not arrive at the appointed time, and it was ascertained through the Post Office beyond Oranmore, and, through the Railway Station, beyond Athenry.

All sorts of wild rumours spread about, and considerable anxiety was displayed by some nervous folks, especially as no explanation was forthcoming as to the cause of the delay. The train, which usually arrives about ten minutes to eleven, a.m., steamed in about 2.30 p.m., and it was then learned that the delay was entirely due to the preceding night’s storm interfering with the signalling system, as a result of which the mail had to travel to Galway by pilot.

A fierce storm raged throughout the previous night in portions of the West and Midlands, and in the district between Athenry and Ballinasloe, the snow was piled up by the wind on the railway line for a depth of several feet and the telegraph poles were wrenched out of the grounds.

Night-workers in Galway City declare that they have never before witnessed so fierce a storm, and it raged at its height between 3 and 4 a.m.

From that hour there was no communication in the Dubln direction from the Galway Post Office either by telegraphy or telephone.

A curious effect of the severe weather on stock is illustrated by the fact that two cattle weighed in Oranmore last Monday week were found to have reduced by 1.5 cwt. when weighed at Galway a week later.

1940

Pleasure craze

In his Pastoral Letter, his lordship Most Rev. Dr. Fogarty, appeals to the people to observe the Lent in the proper spirit and goes on to issue a warning against certain vices. In regard to “rioting and drunkenness”, his lordship says:

“Any man who cannot restrain himself within the limits of decency – and there are such – should not touch drink at all. All young men, and still more all young girls, should be total abstainers.

“They have the best of all stimulants in their young blood, and anything like alcohol only perverts and disfigures the beauteous gift of God.

“A young man, and still worse, a young woman under the influence of drink is the saddest and ugliest sight on earth.

“The social developments that have taken place in our time carry with them undoubtedly very serious dangers to virtue. A levity of behaviour, a passion for pleasure and dancing, a craze for excursions and running about, a growing assumption in the minds of the young that they are their own masters and do what they like, a weakening of parental control, indiscriminate mingling of the sexes, risky and sometimes absolutely indecent modes in the dress of women, a widely-spread currency of tainted literature, have all become features of our age and are all calculated to break down the modesty and reserve that should serve as the outworks of virtue, and which if once destroyed the central glory of virtue itself is easily lost.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.