Galway Seen

Do We Still Know What the Buildings Are Saying?

Galway City

Walk around Galway long enough and eventually you may notice three letters looking down at you.

IHS.

Or sometimes, YHS.

They appear above old doorways and on distinctive blue plaques that have become part of Galway's streetscape.

Thousands of people must have walked beneath them.

But how many still know what they mean?

The answer begins much further from Galway than those three letters might suggest.

IHS is a Christogram — a shortened representation of the name of Jesus.

It comes from the beginning of the Greek name for Jesus:

ΙΗΣΟΥΣ — Iēsous.

The first three Greek letters became ΙΗΣ, which passed into the Latin alphabet in the familiar form IHS.

Over the centuries people produced other explanations for those letters, including the Latin phrase meaning "Jesus, Saviour of Mankind."

But originally they were something simpler.

They were his name.

The symbol itself is centuries old.

In the fifteenth century, St Bernardine of Siena helped popularise the practice of displaying the Holy Name prominently, including on homes.

Galway's particularly recognisable blue tiles came much later.

In January 1914, Franciscan Fr Francis Donnelly helped begin a renewed devotion to the Holy Name in Galway.

Blue tiles carrying the monogram were placed above the entrances of houses.

They were not simply decoration.

Placed over the doorway, they expressed faith and invoked blessing and protection upon the people living beneath them.

More than a century later, many of those symbols have outlived the people who originally placed them there.

And that creates something interesting.

A symbol can remain perfectly visible while its meaning slowly becomes invisible.

Galway has examples of the IHS monogram that are considerably older still.

Inside Lynch's Castle, for example, an IHS monogram survives on a carved chimney-piece dated 1629.

So when we notice these three letters around Galway, we are looking at something that belongs to more than one period of the city's history.

And perhaps that's what makes small details on old buildings so easy to underestimate.

We tend to think of a building as walls, windows and doors.

But older buildings often contain another layer.

They contain language.

Dates.

Initials.

Family crests.

Religious symbols.

Marks left deliberately by people who expected somebody else to understand them.

Sometimes the marks survive.

It is our ability to read them that disappears.

So the next time you walk beneath one of those little blue symbols in Galway, look up.

The building may have been saying something to you all along.

Galway observed and contemplated by Bam Artiste

Galway Now

Galway Is Rebuilding One of Its Front Doors

Ceannt Station, Galway City

There are many ways to arrive in Galway.

You can drive into it.

You can come by bus.

You can approach it from the sea.

Or you can sit on a train, watch the west of Ireland pass outside the window, and eventually hear that Galway is the next stop.

For those people, Ceannt Station is more than a place where a railway line ends.

It is one of Galway's front doors.

And Galway is rebuilding it.

Work on the major redevelopment of Ceannt Station began in 2024, and what is emerging is considerably more than a refurbishment of the old station.

The station is being expanded from two platforms to five.

There is a new southern entrance, new passenger facilities, improved connections between rail and bus services, accessibility improvements, new retail space and major changes to the tracks and signalling.

Above much of it now stretches something that changes the feeling of the station almost immediately:

a huge new glazed roof.

Light pours through it.

Trains sit beneath it.

And gradually, while the station continues doing the ordinary work of arrivals and departures, a different Ceannt Station is appearing around them.

That matters because railway stations occupy a strange position in the life of a city.

To the people who live here, Ceannt can be somewhere we pass through without thinking very much about it.

We are going somewhere.

We are meeting somebody.

We are trying not to miss the train.

But to somebody arriving in Galway for the first time, the experience is completely different.

They step from the carriage carrying everything they currently know about Galway from somewhere else.

Then the doors open.

They step onto the platform.

And Galway stops being somewhere they were travelling towards.

It becomes somewhere they have arrived.

That makes a railway station one of those unusual buildings whose job is not simply to serve the people already living in a city.

It introduces the city to strangers.

The redevelopment is also preparing Ceannt for a different future.

Five platforms create the possibility of considerably more rail capacity, while the station is being designed as a more integrated transport hub in the heart of Galway.

So while the steel, glass, tracks and platforms are the things we can see changing, something larger is happening underneath all of it.

Galway is thinking about how people will arrive here in the years ahead.

And perhaps that is the interesting thing about rebuilding a railway station.

You are not simply rebuilding somewhere people leave from.

You are rebuilding the place where Galway begins for somebody who has just arrived.

Galway observed and contemplated by Bam Artiste

Galway County

What Do You Do With a Building After Its Original Purpose Has Ended?

Ballinasloe, County Galway

Buildings are usually created with an answer already attached to them.

A school is built for teaching.

A hospital is built for caring for the sick.

And a nurses' home is built because, somewhere nearby, there are nurses who need somewhere to live.

But buildings often last longer than the circumstances that created them.

In Ballinasloe, the former St Brigid's Nurses Home has now entered that strange period in the life of a building when its past is perfectly clear, but its future is not.

Galway County Council has acquired the property, together with substantial surrounding lands.

The building once belonged to a much larger institutional landscape associated with St Brigid's in Ballinasloe.

Generations of people would have understood immediately why a nurses' home was there.

The institution created the need.

The need created the building.

Then Galway changed.

The original purpose faded, but the bricks remained.

And perhaps that is when an old building becomes particularly interesting.

A building doesn't die when its original purpose ends.

It waits.

There have already been different ideas about what this property might become.

Earlier discussion included the possibility of using it for a domestic-violence refuge, while there have also been calls for community uses.

At present, however, there is no final concrete plan defining the building's next life.

And maybe there is something valuable about looking at it during this moment, before that answer arrives.

Because places like this remind us that towns and cities inherit more than history.

They inherit buildings.

Buildings created for industries that disappear. Schools built for populations that move. Religious buildings whose congregations change. Institutional buildings created around systems that society later reorganises or leaves behind.

Demolition is one possible ending.

But reuse asks a much more interesting question:

Can a building created for one Galway become useful to another?

The former nurses' home already contains the evidence of one period in Ballinasloe's story.

Whatever eventually happens there will add another.

Perhaps people will one day walk through those doors for a reason nobody imagined when the building was first constructed.

And if that happens, the building will not have lost its history.

It will simply have acquired a future.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about an old building isn't what it used to be.

It's that somebody eventually has to decide what it gets to become next.

Galway observed and contemplated by Bam Artiste

Galway Now

A Piano Waiting for Someone Who Doesn't Know They Can Play Yet

Ceannt Station, Galway City

Railway stations are built around movement.

People arrive. People leave. Suitcases roll across the floor. Someone watches the departure board. Someone else is already late.

And now, in the middle of all that movement at Galway's Ceannt Station, there is a piano.

But this is not a new piano waiting for its first story.

It already has one.

The piano belonged to Treasa Callan, who received it as a teenager in 1959. For decades it lived with her family, providing music for family occasions and becoming part of their lives.

Treasa died in 2019.

Afterwards, her husband Pat and the Callan family wanted the piano to go somewhere it could continue doing what Treasa had loved:

Making music.

The instrument was restored by piano tuner and public piano curator John Murphy and transformed visually by illustrator Rachelle O'Regan.

Its artwork reaches into Galway itself, drawing on the ancient story of Gaillimh, the legendary daughter of Breasail who is said to have drowned in the river that came to bear her name.

There is even a remarkable coincidence hidden in the finished artwork.

The artist used strong blue and maritime imagery without knowing that Treasa particularly loved royal blue and swimming.

A piano that spent more than sixty years inside one family's story has now entered Galway's.

And perhaps its new location is what makes that transition so interesting.

Ceannt Station is being redeveloped as one of the principal gateways into Galway.

Hundreds of thousands of people will pass through. Most will be going somewhere else.

But every now and again, someone will stop.

A musician might sit down and fill the station with something beautiful.

Someone else might play badly.

Someone might touch the keys simply because their train is late and there is nothing else to do.

And then there is the possibility that makes this little addition to Galway particularly lovely.

A child might sit down who doesn't know how to play yet.

Treasa's daughter Claire spoke at the unveiling about exactly that possibility: sometimes you encounter an amazing musician playing a station piano, and sometimes you encounter an eight-year-old simply having a go.

That eight-year-old might eventually become the amazing musician.

And suddenly this piano becomes about something larger than preserving an old family instrument.

It becomes about passing something on.

Treasa once received this piano as a teenager.

More than six decades later, her family has effectively given it to Galway.

They cannot know who will sit at it.

They cannot know what will be played.

And they certainly cannot know whether one of those uncertain little hands touching its keys for the first time belongs to somebody who will spend the rest of their life making music.

But the piano will be there waiting for them.

Galway observed and contemplated by Bam Artiste

Galway Now

A Galway Park That Exists on Paper Before It Exists on the Ground

Kingston, Galway City — September 2026

Somewhere in Galway there is a park that people cannot walk through yet.

For now, much of it exists in plans, drawings and decisions about what this part of the city could eventually become.

But this week those plans moved another step towards becoming a real place.

Planning permission has been granted for the redevelopment of Kingston Park and Millers Lane Park, with €7.5 million in funding also announced to begin the first phase at Kingston.

The wider project proposes new sports facilities, community spaces, walking and cycling connections, biodiversity improvements and new areas of public open space.

Eventually people may walk through it, children may play there and somebody may sit outside a café without giving much thought to how the place began.

But right now is different.

Right now Galway gets to see something that cities don't always stop to notice:

the moment when a future piece of the city exists more clearly on paper than it does on the ground.

GalwayCityNow

Galway Now

While Galway Rebuilds Their Home, Someone Has to Feed the Squirrels

Merlin Woods, Galway City — September 2026

There is a much bigger story unfolding in Merlin Woods.

Storm Éowyn badly damaged parts of the woodland, particularly areas containing Norway spruce, and work is now underway as Galway City Council prepares to restore damaged areas with native woodland.

But hidden inside that much larger story is a smaller one.

The squirrels still have to live there.

Merlin Woods is home to a population of native red squirrels, and while damaged trees are being cleared and the woodland begins what could be a long process of recovery, their habitat is changing around them.

So squirrel feeders are being installed.

The supplementary feeding programme is intended to support the red squirrels while the woodland is restored. Recent reports from a Galway City Council meeting suggest that support could continue for eight to ten years.

That's the part of the story that caught my attention.

We often talk about rebuilding a place as though the only question is what eventually replaces what was lost. But between the damage and the recovery there are creatures that still have to make a life there.

New trees can be planted.

A woodland can grow again.

But while Galway waits for that new woodland to become a forest, somebody has to remember the squirrels already living in it.

GalwayCityNow

Galway Now

Now We Know Why He's Still Sitting There

Middle Arch, Galway City — September 2026

A few days ago I went walking around Galway looking for something worth stopping to notice.

I found a man sitting beside the Corrib.

Not an ordinary man, of course, but Sean Henry's monumental sculpture Seated Figure, still occupying his place at Middle Arch months after arriving in Galway for the International Arts Festival.

That was what caught my attention.

When the sculpture arrived during the summer, it was expected to remain in Galway until the festival ended in late July.

But when I photographed him in September, he was still sitting there.

Now we know why.

Galway International Arts Festival has confirmed that Seated Figure, along with Sean Henry's The Wanderer in Eyre Square, remained in the city so that people could see them through Culture Night on Friday, 18 September.

Culture Night is being presented as the final opportunity to encounter the two works before they leave Galway.

So the question raised when I stood beside the Corrib a few days ago has an answer.

He didn't simply stay behind after the festival. His visit to Galway had been extended.

And now the Galway visitor who stayed a little longer than expected is finally preparing to leave.

Photograph and observation: Bam Artiste

Galway Seen

He's Still Sitting There

Middle Arch, Claddagh — 14 September 2026

I went walking around Galway this morning looking for something worth stopping to notice.

And there he was.

Sitting beside the Corrib, arms resting across his satchel, apparently watching Galway go by.

He is Seated Figure, a monumental sculpture by British artist Sean Henry. The work was installed at Middle Arch in June as part of the build-up to Galway International Arts Festival 2026 and Henry's exhibition, Presence.

When the sculpture arrived, it was reported that it would remain here until the festival ended in late July.

It is now September.

And he's still sitting there.

Maybe that's what caught my attention more than anything else. Festivals arrive, transform Galway for a few weeks, and then disappear. Posters come down. Venues return to normal. Crowds move on.

But occasionally something seems to linger behind.

Today people walked past him, stopped beside him and looked out across the water. Meanwhile he remained exactly where I found him — a silent visitor who, at least for now, appears to have stayed in Galway a little longer than expected... no more than most of us.

Photograph and observation: Bam Artiste

Galway Now

Investigating Tomorrow's Floods — In Today's Rain

Raven Terrace, Galway City — 14 September 2026

It had been raining in Galway all day when I walked down to Raven Terrace.

The road was closed. Red barriers stretched across the wet street, machinery occupied part of the roadway and workers in rain gear continued working while the rain came down around them.

There was a certain irony in what I was looking at.

The work taking place at Raven Terrace is part of site investigations connected with plans for flood relief in Galway — preparations intended to help the city deal with water in the future.

And here they were doing it in today's rain.

Galway City Council announced the temporary closure of Raven Terrace from 14 to 18 September to allow site investigation works for a flood relief system to be carried out.

Standing there made the official description feel much less abstract. The road surface was shining with rain. Water ran along the street. Workers moved between the barriers and equipment while pedestrians made their way around the works beneath umbrellas and hoods.

One of the workers noticed me taking photographs and, despite working outside in the rain, looked across and gave me a thumbs-up.

That small moment somehow suited the scene.

Flood protection is something usually discussed in plans, reports and future tense. But today, on Raven Terrace, part of that preparation was happening in front of me — barriers up, machinery working and Galway rain falling on everybody involved.

Photograph and observation: Bam Artiste

Bam's Galway

I Went Looking for Galway — And Found Jamaica

St Nicholas' Collegiate Church, Galway City — 14 September 2026

I wasn't looking for Jamaica.

I was walking through Galway City when I wandered into the grounds of St Nicholas' Collegiate Church and began looking at some of the old memorials.

Then three words caught my attention.

“Island of Jamaica.”

The weathered memorial is dedicated to Mrs Isabella Copland, widow of William Copland, and describes her as formerly of the Island of Jamaica. She died on 10 March 1837, aged 71.

I stopped.

Jamaica is where I came from. Galway is where I now live. And here, in the middle of the city, I had unexpectedly stumbled across a connection between the two.

I don't know Isabella Copland's full story, or exactly what brought her from Jamaica into the history of Galway. The stone itself raises more questions than it answers.

But perhaps that is part of what makes walking through an old city interesting. Sometimes you go looking for Galway and find something you never expected to be looking for at all.

Photograph and observation: Bam Artiste

Living Galway

Galway Before Galway Wakes Up

Galway City Centre

I've seen Galway at an hour when much of the city is still asleep.

Around 5:00 in the morning, before the shops open and before most people begin making their way into the city centre, another working day has already begun.

Galway City Council cleaning crews are out on the streets. Sweepers move through the city centre while streets are washed and yesterday's dirt is cleared away before another day begins.

At that hour Galway feels like a different place. The streets that will later fill with shoppers, workers, visitors, musicians and delivery vehicles are quieter, while a small number of people are already working to prepare them.

Most of us encounter the result without ever seeing the work.

By the time Galway wakes up, part of somebody else's working day has already happened.

Observation: Bam Artiste

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