Galway Advertiser 1981/1981_01_22/GA_22011981_E1_004.pdf 

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CUNNIFFES
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GALWAY SHOPPING CENTRE

Other names associated Mr. Sean Sullivan of 18 St. Joseph's Avenue kindly with the Foundary were gave us this photograph of John Allen and 'Mate' some of the men who Lydon. It was obviously worked in the Galway quite a big employer. Its a Foundary and Engineering shame that it has been Co. Ltd. in Galway in 1936. derelict for so long. The f o u n d r y is o n They are, back row, left to right, M. Donoghue; W. Ballymane Island according Flynn; D . Canavan; E. to the 1818 map of Galway Cubbard; G. Graham; S. (Baile Meadonach), altho Murphy; C. MacDonagh; ugh one would not think of M. Geary and M. Costello. it as an Island to-day. Mrs. Cloherty from the Centre: J. Riddell; M. C o s t e l l o ; T. L e e ; N . Claddagh called in to give us Conneely; T. Riddle; S. some more details about Sullivan; M. Kelly; C. Gleesons corner that we MacDonagh and T . were writing about last week. As we said, it was at Sullivan. Front row: P. Geary; M. the turn of the century L a f f y ; R. L a l l y ; P . owned by the River Plate Frozen Meat Company, McDonagh; R. Cantwell; N. although they only had a Lamb and P. Laffv.

small part of the building at the corner. There was a large marble frontage and no windows, only shutters. During the first world war years it was run as a Soldiers & Sailors Rest, with restaurant, billiard room, music room, etc. It was administered by a Commit tee which included Colonel Osborne's wife, Col. Shanner's wife, and Miss Pearse. Mrs. Birkett was the caretaker. There was a tunnell running from the basement across to Greally's Chemist shop and giving access to a maze of tunnels which could bring you down to St. Nicholas' Church. The Birkett family lived for a while after the war in the

Abbeygate St. end of the building. After they moved, the building lay idle for a while before being bought by the Gleeson family. J i m H i g g i n s o f the Archeology Department of U.C.G. is working on a thesis which is provisinally called "Early Christian & Medieval Architecture & Sites in County Galway". He is particularly interested in seeing any carvings or fragments or sites, or in hearing any local folklore about children's burial grounds or bullaun stones etc. If you can help him, he would appreciate a call at U.C.G.

S C U B A - DIVING
GALWAY SUB A Q U A CLUB An introductory talk and display of equipment takes place on Tuesday, 27th January, in the Galway Bay Hotel at 8.30 pan. Admission Free -- All are welcome. TRAINING FOR BEGINNERS Commences on Friday, 30th January at 7.30 p.m. sharp in the Clubhouse, Cross Street (under Kenny's Bookshop). Bring swimming togs and towel.

galway leanings
The rather irregular conscious campaign against [coverage of book-publicati- anti-Unionist politicians is jons which has for long been still afoot in Northern fa feature of this column was I r e l a n d , a n d that the .further upset by the week- assassination of those who lend news of the shooting of talk up for Nationalist 'Bernadette Devlin and her rights, is seen not only to be husband Michael McAliskey a t o p p r i o r i t y , but lat t h e i r h o m e n e a r something which we have ' Coalisland Co. Tyrone. almost come to expect, ever This, in turn, led us to re since Maire Drumm was read "The Price of My Soul" shot down in her hospital the sharp-worded paperb bed in Belfast in the midack which Bernadette wrote 1970s. There have been | as a Pan Special after she continuing suggestions, as was first elected to represent M i r i a m D a l e y , J o h n the people of Mid-Ulster at Turnley, Ronnie Bunting | the By-Election in April, and Noel Lyttle, have all 1969. That 200 page edition been picked off over the past of the paperback cost 6/- months, that prominent | and we heartily recommend members of the National Hit to all who are interested in Blocks Committee have the roots of the continuing been selected out for special | Northern Ireland mess a t t e n t i o n by L o y a l i s t which has now been boiling paramilitants. One already over in its present form for hears s u g g e s t i o n s that lover ten years now, but people like Bernadette which of course goes back a "cannot expect anything great deal further than that. else" because of their open I The price of the book is only and frank campaigning for one reminder of just how various political causes by I time is passing by, even for political means. The real ' Bernadette Devlin, student- question that needs to be politician, who was an asked, of course, is why the i international phenomenon! l a r g e s t paramilitary before she was 21, and who grouping in the North, the was the youngest M.P. male U.D.A., remains off the list , or female to be elected to the o f p r o s c r i b e d i l l e g a l I Commons in over 200 years. organisations? Is it simply a H-BLOCK TARGETS case of the British What is, perhaps, much Government being unwill more disturbing is the ing or unable to move o b v i o u s reality that a against Loyalist threats, as it
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was in 1977, 1974, 1972, indeed every time there was a challenge back to 1912 and 1885? And w h y should people like Bernadette McAliskey have to pay such a high price simply because they refuse to be bought by establishments, British or Irish, and c o n t i n u e to articulate the aspirations and viewpoints, the grievences and complaints o f their s i d e o f the community in Northern Ireland? The lesson seems to be that it is those who speak out, those who deal honestly and openly, those who take the British democratic boast at its word and try to work politically, openly and publicly, who are the real targets in the North. They always have been in Ulster Loyalist eyes, and the rapidly-disappearing make up of the H-Block committee over the past months is proof, if proof were needed, that little has changed. SPEAKING OUT B e r n a d e t t e a n d her husband will, with God's help, survive and live to fight again politically. She is sufficiently experienced in the nasty business of politics by now, not to expect very widespread condemnations of the attack on her from her political enemies. And though she probably would understand the less than enthusiastic disire of RTE to facilitate on such occasions, the numbers of those "on her side" of the fence who held their peace is amazing. At least Bill Craig suggested she deserved what she got b e c a u s e o f " h e r past associations." Mr. Craig was always a master of the "guilt by a s s o c i a t i o n " technique, though RTE did not go to any great lengths in

reminding listeners that he, too, had been rejected at the polls by the people of East Belfast in the 1979 General Election -- to be replaced by the P a i s l e y i t e , D . U . P . candidate. But the sound of silence was most marked in the case of old former SDLP friends, a n d of course former SDLP leader Gerry Fitt who clashed with her on the H-Block issue and who, has had, if we are to believe those dramatic RTE interviews, several attempts on his own life at home. Perhaps Gerry is a better man with a gun (Bernadette, it seems, was refused a firearms licence by the R.U.C.) or perhaps all those alleged attackers in West Belfast are not as good as those who shot Mariam Daly, Ronnie Bunting and Noel Lyttle? The central message however seems to be that it is those who are prepared to speak out and demand changes in the North to such a degree that they can, hopefully, be seen to transform the nature of that society, that are most hated and are specifically selected for what can only be d e s c r i b e d as p o l i t i c a l assassination. DISIPLINED ANTI-IMPERIALIST Bernadette McAliskey's fate is all the more sad if one recalls the way she was built up into a heroine by the establishment when she first became an M.P. When she arrived at Westminster in April 1969 -- when she was still aged only 21 -- she was welcomed with open arms not only by Gerry Fitt from Belfast but also by Labour Home Secretary at the time Jim Callaghan and by Norman St. John-Stevens of the Conservative Party.

There have been many twists and turns in the Bernadette Devlin story since then. In 1971, for example, she had to face the lonely crisis of the pregnant unmarried mother admist a glare of media publicity, but in spite of the considerable pressure which British establishment figures brought upon her to have an abortion, Bernadette went through with having her baby, and keeping it. Those who could not grasp the reasoning at that time, and on several issues since then, failed to realise that she was first and foremost a Tyrone Catholic in the Fenian tradition, a disciplined antiimperialist w h o would always return to the basics of the traditional Irish Nationalist position. That is why she parted ways with many old friends in the course of the 1970s and why she saw the Long Kesh H-Blocks issue as crucial, right from the beginning and even, for example, at the time of the European Elections when she was c r i t i c i s e d by Provisional Sinn Fein who felt her campaign was interfering with their own boycott campaign. Bernadette D e v l i n - M c A l i s k e y , sticking to what she held to be h e r b a s i c "antiimperialist" faith, persisted on the blanket-men stand however, and played a large part in building up that campaign over the past year. SPECIAL TREATMENT The last time we met her was at a meeting about the Women in Armagh Jail which was held in the Mansion House in Dublin on the eve of the big national rally in December. She looked older and more tired than what she used to in the

mid-1970s. For even though she had lost her Westminster seat, and was now busy rearing her young family, the former fiery student agitator was still available to campaign for what she saw as good causes throughout the land, on a concerned and principled radical line. She toured the small-farming areas of the West at the time of the EEC referendum, and lent her name to the antihanging agitation of 1976. In her Mansion House address, last December, she was more than willing to discuss the mistakes of the past 10--12 years of public campaigning, providing intelligent analysis of what had been won and what had gone wrong, yet insisting that the basics of what she, and others, set out to do a dozen years ago, was still not only valid, but the only way forward to the creation of a Society where there would be no need for occasional flowering of peace-movements and demands for basic justice. "Where are the Peace People now?" she asked. They w o u l d have to continue to demand basic changes; everybody knew that these had not been achieved. One shuddered to think that people had been fooled into thinking otherwise, or had changed their minds -- or had decided that the price of continuing to speak out was too high. Bernadette had no notion of adandoning the struggle. Which was probably why she was s i n g l e d o u t , with her husband and family, for special treatment last week.
Compiled by Nollaig O Gadhra