Galway Seasonal

Halloween in Galway — An Ancient Irish Tradition Still Alive

Galway City, Ireland

As October draws towards its final night, Galway City begins to take on a different appearance. Pumpkins, costumes, skeletons and Halloween decorations appear in shop windows, while the city's medieval streets provide a fitting backdrop for the season.

But Halloween is much older than the decorations we recognise today.

Its roots reach back to Samhain, an ancient Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. Traditionally observed around the transition from October into November, Samhain occupied an important place in the seasonal calendar of Ireland.

In Irish folklore, this was a time when the boundary between the living and the supernatural was believed to become unusually thin. Spirits, otherworldly beings and strange encounters belonged to the stories associated with this turning of the year.

Over centuries, these older traditions became intertwined with the Christian observance of All Saints' Day. The evening before became known as All Hallows' Eve, from which the name Halloween developed.

Even the familiar carved Halloween lantern has an Irish connection.

Before pumpkins became the popular choice, people in Ireland carved frightening faces into turnips. Irish emigrants helped carry Halloween customs across the Atlantic, where pumpkins proved much easier to carve.

Today, Halloween is celebrated across much of the world, but Ireland remains one of the places where its oldest cultural roots can still be traced.

And Galway has an atmosphere particularly suited to the occasion.

Walk through the Latin Quarter after darkness falls. Pass beneath the old stonework, wander along the narrow streets, or stand near the Spanish Arch with the autumn air coming in from Galway Bay.

The city does not need much assistance from Halloween decorations to remind us that it has been standing here for centuries.

On Friday, 31 October 2026, Halloween will once again bring costumes, celebrations and a little theatrical mischief to Galway.

And behind all the modern entertainment remains something much older: an Irish tradition that has travelled around the world and returned each October to the streets where its history still feels close at hand.

Halloween may now belong to the world.

But some of its oldest roots are right here in Ireland.

Observation By: Bam Artiste

Galway Lost

The Vanished Browne Mansion

Lower Abbeygate Street, Galway City

Most people in Galway know the Browne Doorway. It stands in Eyre Square, separated from any house, looking almost as though it was built simply to be a monument.

But the doorway once belonged to something much bigger.

On the west side of Lower Abbeygate Street, close to its junction with St Augustine Street, stood the Browne Mansion — one of the substantial town houses belonging to Galway's wealthy merchant families.

The exact age of the house is not quite as simple as the famous date carved into its surviving doorway. Historical accounts have placed an earlier Browne house on the site in the sixteenth century, while the elaborate entrance associated with Martin Browne and Marie Lynch carries the date 1627. By the time Galway's famous pictorial map was made in 1651, the building was already important enough to be identified as the mansion house of Martin Browne.

And this was no small house.

An architectural description from the nineteenth century records a three-storey building, with a courtyard behind it and an external staircase giving access to the upper floors. Old descriptions and images show a tall merchant house occupying the street rather than the isolated piece of stonework we recognise today.

It also stood in distinguished company. Abbeygate Street was part of the tightly built commercial heart of old Galway, and other great merchant houses stood nearby. The Brownes themselves possessed more than one substantial house in this part of the city.

Time was less kind to the mansion than it was to its carved entrance.

During its later life the old house was divided into shops and tenements. A photograph from around 1870 already shows what are described as the remains of the Browne Mansion on Lower Abbeygate Street. By the beginning of the twentieth century the building was in a ruinous state and its survival was coming to an end.

The house disappeared, but part of its face was saved. The great stone doorway, together with the oriel window above it, was removed and eventually re-erected in Eyre Square in 1905.

The ground it left behind did not remain frozen in time. An archaeological excavation carried out on the original site in 1990, ahead of redevelopment, found the area heavily disturbed by later building. Foundations uncovered there were thought to belong mainly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only scattered pieces of cut stone survived as evidence of earlier activity.

Which means the vanished Browne Mansion is not somewhere we can only visit on an old map.

We can still walk down Lower Abbeygate Street today, reach the junction with St Augustine Street, and stand at the place where one of Galway's great merchant houses once stood.

Then, only a short walk away, we can find part of that same house standing in Eyre Square.

Galway did not lose the Browne Mansion without leaving a clue.

We have been walking past the clue for more than a century.

Observation By: Bam Artiste

Galway Seen

Everybody Looks at Shop Street. We Looked Underneath It.

Shop Street, Galway City

Thousands of feet pass along Shop Street.

Shopping bags. Coffee cups. Buskers. Tourists. People heading to work and people with nowhere particular to be.

But beneath all those feet is another Galway.

During resurfacing works on Shop Street in June 2019, archaeologists uncovered human remains outside No. 28 — a discovery now documented as part of a newly published archaeological report covering years of work beneath Galway's city-centre streets.

They were found only about 320 millimetres beneath the existing paved surface.

About 32 centimetres.

The archaeological report suggests the remains may be associated with the old burial ground of St Nicholas' Collegiate Church.

The churchyard we see today was once part of a burial landscape that extended farther into the surrounding medieval city.

And the human remains were not the only Galway waiting underneath the modern street.

Archaeologists also encountered the remains of a stone-and-brick barrel-vaulted basement extending beneath Shop Street, along with archaeological deposits and structural remains belonging to earlier periods of the city.

Among those deposits was what archaeologists call the "Galway Black" layer — dark organic material associated with the long occupation of medieval Galway.

None of this is obvious when you stand on Shop Street today.

And perhaps that is what makes it interesting.

Galway's history is not always standing in front of us wearing a plaque.

Sometimes it is underneath a paving stone.

The next time you walk along Shop Street, look around at the modern city.

Then remember:

another Galway is only a few centimetres beneath your shoes.

Observation By: Bam Artiste

Living Galway

The Business Is Leaving. The Building Has Seen This Before.

Upper Abbeygate Street, Galway City

On Saturday, 3 October, Elizabeth C Beauty will close its doors for the final time after 35 years in Galway.

For Eilish MacDonald and Siobhan Fennell, it marks retirement and the end of a business that has been part of the lives of generations of Galway customers.

But there are two very different clocks ticking at this address.

Elizabeth C began on Castle Street in 1991 and moved to Upper Abbeygate Street in 1996.

The building it moved into was already more than four centuries old.

It dates to 1561.

Behind the modern shopfront and treatment rooms are reminders of a much older Galway — timber beams and ancient arches of black granite incorporated into the building that stands there today.

Think about that for a moment.

When Elizabeth C arrived here in 1996, the building had already been standing for roughly 435 years.

The business became part of its story for the next three decades.

Customers came through its doors for ordinary appointments and important occasions. Staff came and went. Friendships were made. Galway outside continued changing.

Now that chapter is ending.

The premises are on the market, and whatever comes next will inherit something much older than a commercial address.

That is one of the peculiar things about walking through Galway.

Sometimes a business closing feels like the end of something.

Then you look at the building.

It has seen endings before.

Observation By: Bam Artiste

Living Galway

How 34 People and a Plate of Oysters Started a Galway Tradition

Galway City

Every year, on the last weekend of September, Galway celebrates something that began much more modestly than the international festival we know today.

It started in 1954.

Brian Collins, then manager of Galway's Great Southern Hotel — today's Hardiman — was looking for a way to encourage visitors to remain in Galway beyond the traditional summer tourist season.

The answer was already sitting in Galway Bay.

Oysters.

September marked the beginning of the native oyster season, and Collins helped create a festival around Galway's annual harvest, originally organised in conjunction with Paddy Burke's Bar in Clarinbridge.

Just 34 guests attended that first Oyster Festival Banquet.

More than seven decades later, those few tables have grown into the Galway International Oyster & Seafood Festival, drawing thousands of people to Galway.

In 2026 the festival runs from 25 to 27 September, keeping its traditional place on the final weekend of the month.

And somewhere along the way, Galway's celebration became a world competition.

On Saturday, competitors representing 16 nations — from Canada to Australia — will gather on Cross Street for the World Oyster Opening Championship.

They are not simply racing to attack a pile of shellfish.

Each competitor must open 30 oysters. Speed matters, but so does precision: damaged oysters, shell or grit, poor presentation and other faults can bring penalties.

The international competitors reach Galway through national competitions and oyster-opening traditions in their own countries, turning a local Galway harvest into an annual meeting between oyster communities from around the world.

There will also be an Oyster Trail, seafood, music, street entertainment and a Sunday programme looking at aquaculture, sustainability and the marine environment.

But underneath all of that, the original idea remains remarkably easy to recognise.

The oyster season begins. Galway celebrates.

What began with 34 people in 1954 now brings part of the oyster world to Galway every September.

Observation: Bam Artiste

Galway Now

Galway Is About to Change These Streets. So I Went to Look at Them Again.

Cross Street, Galway City

There are parts of a city you don't really look at until somebody tells you they are about to change.

Cross Street is one of them.

Galway City Council has approved an €11 million rejuvenation project for this part of the city's historic medieval core.

The plans stretch beyond Cross Street itself, taking in Middle Street, Abbeygate Street Lower, Buttermilk Lane and Buttermilk Walk.

New paving, lighting, landscaping and street furniture are planned, alongside changes intended to make the area safer and more accessible for people moving through it.

Construction is expected to begin in mid-2028.

Which means there is still time to look at what is here now.

Not the architect's impression.

Not the Galway of 2028.

This Galway.

Cross Street and the lanes around it sit inside Galway's Architectural Conservation Area, where the medieval shape of the city still survives beneath the movement of the modern one.

People walk through here to work, to eat, to drink, to shop or simply to get somewhere else.

And perhaps that is why ordinary streets are so easy to overlook.

We notice the Spanish Arch.

We notice Eyre Square.

But sometimes the streets between the landmarks are where a city is quietly keeping most of its life.

The Council describes the project as a rejuvenation.

Maybe it will be.

But before the paving is lifted, before the new lights arrive and before today's street becomes somebody's memory of how Cross Street used to look, there is something worth doing.

Look at it.

Because cities don't only disappear when buildings are demolished.

Sometimes they disappear one paving stone, one street corner and one familiar little detail at a time.

Galway is planning what these streets will become.

GalwayCityNow is interested in remembering what they were before they got there.

Photograph and observation: Bam Artiste

Galway Seen

I Went Down Druid Lane Looking for Flags. I Found This Instead.

Druid Lane, Galway City

I hadn't gone to Druid Lane looking for an art exhibition.

I had gone there to photograph something else entirely.

Halfway down the lane, behind the glass of Galway Civic Trust at the Hall of the Red Earl, something stopped me: paintings — large, restless compositions filled with colour, marks, fragments, figures and words.

So I went inside.

The exhibition is Grey Quarters, featuring work by Arthur Rosa and Hansel Vieuxpatinaeh at the Peadar O'Dowd Gallery.

Standing in front of the work, one name kept coming into the conversation: Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Not because these paintings should be reduced to somebody else's work, and not because either artist was claiming him as an influence.

It was simply difficult not to notice something familiar in the visual language — the urgency of the marks, scratched and written elements, figures emerging and disappearing beneath layers of paint, and the feeling that the surface had been worked on rather than merely painted.

Rosa, born in Natal, Brazil and now based in Galway, is a self-taught artist whose route into painting began through music.

Vieuxpatinaeh's route is different: born in the West Indies, with formative years in Haiti, raised in New York City and now based in the west of Ireland.

Yet music appears in his story too, informing the rhythm and emotional cadence of his painting.

Perhaps that explains something I felt looking at the work.

These paintings don't seem particularly interested in just standing still. They seem to leap from the canvas and join in the chit-chat.

And there they are, halfway down Druid Lane, hanging above the remains of medieval Galway.

I went looking for one story.

Galway gave me another.

Grey Quarters — Peadar O'Dowd Gallery, Hall of the Red Earl, Druid Lane. Exhibition runs until 2 October 2026.

Photograph and observation: Bam Artiste

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

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