Ireland Day 8 Wednesday 5th April 2023 Galway

 

We walked into town past the harbour. We wanted to tie green ribbons on the River Corrib bridge  rails where we scattered Tommy's ashes yesterday, in the rain, with Martina.

The Galway girl sits outside the Quays bar in the Latin Quarter , constructed in 2022 

No one knows her meaning 

A  young mother waiting  outside the pub to extract money from her weans father drinking inside, before it's all spent, to feed the family waiting  at home? 

A customer taking up valuable drinking space ? 

The woman  referred to in the song 'Galway girl? '

I favour the first.

Here is Jeanne Rathbones interpretation 

 

https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/a-galway-girl-song-deconstructed/

She refers to  Nora Barnacle (who James Joyce  married ) who comes from Galway.

The Spanish arch  (Galway had a long trading association with Spain) with a female busker playing a pleasant tune.

We visited the Galway museum (just beyond it facing the harbour)  which offered an absorbing and heart rending  explanation of the struggle for the Irish state , free of British domination. The kind staff had to ask us to leave at closing time.

The Galway hooker style boat 

The Galway hooker (Irish: húicéir) is a traditional fishing boat used in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland. The hooker was developed for the strong seas there. It is identified by its sharp, clean entry, bluff bow, marked tumblehome and raked transom. Its sail plan consists of a single mast with a main sail and two foresails. Traditionally, the boat is black (being coated in pitch) and the sails are a dark red-brown.

Interesting styles of architecture in parts of town, this is a shop called  The Treasure Chest in Williams st.

We called into the huge grey slate Galway  cathedral constructed between 1952 and 1965 and then walked up to the salmon weir on the fast flowing River Corrib (fastest in Europe remember 🙂)

A disturbed night at the campsite followed, with a woman running around the vans shouting very angrily  and  in a seemingly very inebriated  state at 2.30 am, she eventually calmed down by 3.30 am and went back to her van,  I didn't get back to sleep until 6;  as only anger could be heard and not distress, I didn't get up, but I was kept awake wondering whether I should have; it is really hard to know whether to intervene when someone is that angry and incoherent. Andy slept through the whole disturbance; we found the partner sitting outside on the wall to the beach when we woke, he seemed to have been there a while. There did not seem to be any violence involved.