Galway’s nuclear bunker now just a storeroom

It was to be the bolt hole nerve centre for the elite group of people who would keep the city and county ticking over should the nuclear holocaust arrive in the late 1960s . . . now it’s just a basement store in the bowels of the Community College at Moneenageisha in Galway city.

Galway’s only nuclear bunker was constructed as part of the Moneenageisha Vocational School that opened its doors in September, 1969, at a time when the Cuban missile crisis was still fresh in the minds of everyone and the Vietnam War raged on.

Constructing a nuclear bunker under a new school exercised the minds of councillors and local education committees amidst rumours, that as well as the emergency services heads, one Bishop Michael Browne would also be offered shelter in the concrete sanctuary should the nukes start going off.

Civil Defence Officer, Brendan Qualter, showing some of the equipment in the shelter to Galway Community College students Victor Gutu and Taylor Carr who are dressed in 1960s style.

At the time in the mid-1960s, the local Vocational Education voiced their opposition to the construction of the nuclear shelter beneath the floors of the proposed new school after being told that the County Council wanted to locate it there because ‘they were unable to find any other suitable place in Galway’.

The then Chief Executive Officer of the City Vocational Educational Committee, Mr. S. MacDomhnail, advised his members that it would be wrong to accede to a request from Galway County Council for the school to be built ‘on top of a nuclear bomb shelter’.

Now 46 years on from its official opening, the bunker is set to become part of a living history project at the Galway Community College (GCC) with teacher Philip Cribbin planning to get his history pupils to itemise and ‘put on line’ a range of documentation, memorabilia and equipment still held in the centre.

“This [late 1960s] was a very volatile time around the world. It came after the Cuban missile crisis . . . the Vietnam War was at its peak . . . Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in 1968 . . . US Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their black power salutes at the medals’ ceremony in Mexico [also ‘68] . . . and the Cold War between the USA and Russia was still intense,” said Philip Cribbin.

Equipment and bags in the shelter

The Head of History at GCC said that this was an era when there was a very real fear of a nuclear war breaking out between the superpowers and there was a national policy to construct a number of secure bunkers at different locations around the country, where the emergency services and ‘important people’ would move into.

Over recent decades the bunker – reputedly encased in two feet of mass concrete – has been used as a storage facility for the local Civil Defence service, but only about two or three of its many rooms are being accessed.

Head Officer with Galway Civil Defence Brendan Qualter said that there were about eleven rooms in the underground facility including a control and operations centre.

“This was to be a self sufficient and secure centre with its own telecommunications network while there was also a generator to provide emergency power.

A gas mask among the items in the shelter

“It was to be, a place for the directors of operations to locate, should a nuclear disaster occur,” said Brendan Qualter.

Local historian, Peadar O’Dowd, said that the Moneenageisha bomb shelter plan got a lot of attention in Galway before and during its construction in the late 1960s.

“It was a bit of a scary time. Here and there, we would see the odd clip of black and white footage on TV of children in the United States going through drills in the event of a nuclear war.

“There was also a curiosity about who would be going into the bunker should the dreaded nuclear disaster ever occur. Lots of stories did the rounds about who’d be going into the bunker but a lot of them were just bits of Galway gossip.

“It was also felt that the building of this bunker was something of  a first for Galway but there were real concerns that Russia and the US could go to war at any time.

A section of the shelter

“John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, the Vietnam War was raging and while people were still talking about the GAA and the All-Irelands, there was a worry out there too about another world war breaking out,” said Peadar O’Dowd.

For one of Philip Cribbin’s fifth year students, the school’s historical legacy will now provide the subject matter for the case study segment of his course that will make up 20% of his exam marks.

“This really is a very local link between the school and what was going on in the world of international politics and history. It was one of those really interesting periods in world history but thankfully the bunker was never called into use,” said Philip Cribbin.

Much of the original material is still intact at the Moneenageisha bunker such as gas masks, Geiger counters for measuring radioactivity, ordinance survey maps, radioactive survival guides and other documentation stored away in boxes . . . and probably unopened for the past 45 years.

Given its solid concrete construction the bunker seems set to remain as a piece of local history for decades to come, providing an ongoing history focal point for Philip Cribbin’s history classes . . . right under their feet.