Galway Express News Today

It was about this time of year, May 26, 1910 that the foundation stone of St. Mary’s College was laid. It was not, however the first St Mary’s College. Father John Paul O’Toole, born in Galway in 1804, was one of the last priests ordained during the wardenship. He was based in Paris and Rome but was always conscious of his own difficulty in obtaining a food secondary education in Galway, so he decided to return to Galway in 1843 and open a school here. His main difficulty was f...

This Corkman who died at 19 on the Titanic is fabled to have thrown a message into the sea from the decks of the cruiser. A native of Co Cork, Titanic passenger Jeremiah Burke is remembered for tossing a message-in-a-bottle overboard from the sinking Titanic.

Week II

Week II

In the early decades of the 19th century fortunes were made in giving hundreds of thousands of emigrants safe passage to America. As the decades slipped by the numbers grew into millions. Liverpool had the main transatlantic business for these two islands, but Galway, situated some 300 miles closer to America, and with the onset of powerful steam-driven ships, believed that a better and quicker service could be provided.

The first book printed in Ireland was The Book of Common Prayer in 1551. As printing became more sophisticated, newspapers became inevitable. The first gazettes were published originally in manuscript – the word gazette being derived from gazetto, a coin of Venice, the amount paid for reading the news. The earliest printed newspapers began to appear around the end of the 16th century. These were small, quarto in size, printed on one or both sides of the page, or of four pages containing in...