The Glory that was Galway — English Visitor's Impressions of the Old City — the Lynch Tragedy — Shipping Competition with Liverpool

Galway Gossip, March 1st, 1930.

English Visitor to Galway

John Gibbons, an English Catholic, made himself famous a year or two ago by walking all the way from Calais to Lourdes, a distance of seven hundred miles. He started with the usual tramp equipment, a knapsack and a walking stick, and with no knowledge of the language, and yet, like Goldsmith, he got on well and he wrote most interesting impressions of his travels which were first published in a London periodical and next appeared in book form. He came on the same walking mission to Ireland last year and wrote his views in the "Daily Express" each day as he tramped along through the country. He has now published through Messrs Methuen & Co., the London publishers, his "Tramping Through Ireland":. It is readable, a fair and honest expression of his opinions and of what he thinks of us. He has a good deal that is interesting to say about Galway.

The Lynch Tragedy

For years writes Mr. Gibbons I had been rather wanting to see Galway, for oddly enough I had once done a little of the work in hunting out the history of the Lynch story there. The city, of course, in the Middle Ages had been a sort of Liverpool with tall ships trading to Spain. Even today they say that Spanish blood is to be found in Galway. As a kind of Norman outpost against the Irish tribesmen it had had its laws and powers, and its Mayors were invested with the high justice of life and death. A Lynch, one of them had been — there were dozens of Lynch big wigs in the old days in the city — and his son murdered a young Spaniard in love with the wrong girl, and as Mayor his father had sentenced him to death. And then the mob had threatened to break into the prison and rescue the lad. And at the very last minute, as the crowd hammered the door, his father had appeared with his son at an upper window, and there making a truly Roman speech about justice coming before affection, had fixed a rope round the boy's neck and thrown him down. And from this they say, same Lynch law. It is true that two other derivations, far more plausible have been offered, as an explanation for the phrase, but the Mayor Lynch business is the only one that counts in Galway.

Departed Glories

And years earlier some one had paid me to try and look up the whole thing. And now I am actually to see the place. In a way it is rather wonderful and it is almost a pity that most people only know it as the gateway to stop one night and so pass on. For there tucked away behind the main street stands the old town. Its great houses have come sadly down in the world. I know because I went into one and it was a sort of common lodging house. But they must in their time have been rather marvellous houses. Days and days away from even Dublin the place was and so it developed its own fashions and its own architecture. There is the shell of an old house door with no houses behind it that they have stuck up as a Memorial of Galway in its days of Civil opulence and I think that in this way it was one of the saddest and one of the finest things I have ever seen. And I would like to take off my hat to the County Council that put it there. For it was the very first town of which I had ever heard that had the pluck to own that its glories had departed.

Prosperity That Never Came

The Lynch Castle and the Lynch window and the Claddagh — the odd fishermans' village that for centuries is supposed to have kept its blood intact from the town people — every tourist sees them as just as every tourist buys a Claddagh ring — that thing with the two clasped hands and the heart. But I do not think that it is every tourist who realized that Galway had a second tragedy. It was in the eighties of last century and the Middle Ages were over and done with. But Galway was coming again. It was the nearest point of Europe to the United States and they were going to run steamers there, and Liverpool was going to take a second place. And in way of preparation of the prosperity that was coming there was a simply colossal square and hotels, 'Imperial and royal and American' all round it. (You will find all over Ireland that with the coming of the Free state they have simply forgotten to alter the Hotel names!) And when I saw it there was one old lady trying to say her prayers and sell cockles at the same time. (Which you or I would find extremely difficult). For the prosperity never came. There was a great ship that got wrecked in the harbour and the monied people got frightened and so Liverpool kept her trade.

The Most Catholic Town

I met a very old man who wanted to tell me all about it; how there was a bribery and foul play and spies and people in the employment of the great English shipping interests. And how somebody tampered with a compass and so the ship was lost and the money frightened away from Galway. And I told him that I did not believe one single word of it although he was very welcome indeed to another Guinness. But however it all happened the fact remains that the great Square in the middle of the city is too big for any prosperity that has come to it. And besides the Irishness it had something else as well, for even discounting the architecture of the old houses down the quay way and the attractions obviously maintained for the tourist, there was a vague something about the place as though the faintest echo of something foreign remained to it after all these centuries.

There was a funeral that I saw and my mind instantly leaped back to Brussels, the only place I had ever seen anything in the least like it. There was a door I passed where somebody had died and in it they had stuck a notice of precisely the style that I had once seen somewhere abroad. And there were heaps of intangible trifles of the same sort, the vaguest hints, hidden away from the hurried tourist eyes, the city treasured up the fragrance of the foreign glories that once had been Galway's in the proud days when her merchant men traded down to Cadis. And last, it was the most Catholic town that off the Continent I had ever seen.