MARY Keane might be a mite shy about it, but she was subject of a little bit of history-making in Galway recently. The vegetable trader, mother of six and active bridge player from the Clare border has just ended a family connection with the Saturday market which spanned over half-a-century.
In fact, it is close to 60 years since her husband, Sean, began selling produce in the market outside St Nicholas's Collegiate Church. Donkeys and carts were the main form of transport at the time for farmers from west, north and south before the arrival of the turf lorry, truck and train. Michael Staunton, fellow trader and the market's current "king", believes he owes everything to the couple.
"I began here with Sean, and Mary was a great colleague, and if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have lasted these past 50 years and a bit here myself."
Staunton, a vegetable man himself, has witnessed dramatic changes in Galway since he first began travelling north at weekends, with the market being one of the few constants. Galway today is Europe's fastest growing city of its size. But a century ago it was only a fraction of its present size, with a shrinking population, an economy in decline and buildings collapsing all round.
The 1911 Census brought some of the worst news to the "Citie of the Tribes", according to NUI Galway historian John Cunningham, in his recently published history of the port from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. The figures showed that the urban population had fallen for a sixth successive decade to 13,255 people and that a cosmopolitan city built on the wealth of maritime trade and commerce had become a town.
Poverty was endemic. A sworn inquiry into housing conditions heard a graphic description from the then chairman of the board of guardians: "There are people even living in houses where one would not allow pigs," Cunningham quotes him as stating. "About a fortnight ago, one of these houses tumbled down, and a family of seven or eight escaped with their lives. About five or six years ago, fever broke out in Munster Lane,and it took very nearly five months to get rid of it. . ."
Yet the inhabitants of these dwellings were the "sinew and muscle" of Galway's economic life, Cunningham notes - the "men of the west" who worked on the docks, in various mills, on buildings, and who were "tormented" by an Atlantic which had once bought great prosperity. They would soon become organised - establishing a Galway Workers' and General Labourers' Union to the displeasure of "merchant princes" such as Mairtín Mór McDonogh, director of Thos McDonogh and Sons.
Profiled by writer Liam O'Flaherty as the anti-hero, Ramon Mór, in his novel The House of Gold (1939), Mairtín Mór was an "overwhelming presence", according to Cunningham. His description of the gruff, arrogant businessman and of other figures who dominated Galway's economic life at the time gives an invaluable insight into the driving forces that still influence its future. For a post-Famine fear of poverty was etched in the memories of those who moved in from "the west" and may still dominate a collective consciousness.
O'Flaherty may even have been a mite unfair to Mairtín Mór in depicting him as a "capitalist ogre", Cunningham intimates. "Regardless of the ethical basis of its accumulation", he writes, it is undeniable that the McDonogh and Sons "war chest" enabled the businessman to have a hand in "almost every sector of the local economy".
Cunningham's history is a riveting account of a city's successful attempts to regenerate itself, in spite of gloomy predictions by visitors such as William Bulfin, who wrote that it had "gone to the bad when its ocean trade was killed". The changing fortunes of the Claddagh fishing community - "guardian of plebeian cultural distinctiveness in pre-Famine Galway" - is charted, as is the arrival of the railway, an historic visit by that king of temperance, Fr Mathew, the role of religion, various attempts at political mobilisation, and much more. "A town tormented by the sea": Galway, 1790-1914 by John Cunningham is published by Geography Publications, with support from the Heritage Council, at €40.
Cunningham's contribution builds on a canon of historical literature on the city, which ranges from James Hardiman's "bible" to writings by local historian Peadar O'Dowd, to an education pack for primary schools produced by Galway Civic Trust.
Entitled Galway - It's My City, the Civic Trust's pack reproduces the 1651 pictorial map which has served as a baseline for much archaeological work, and includes information on history, placenames, the environment and how to protect it (or what's left of it). Another landmark work represents the outcome of 79 licensed archaeological investigations carried out over 12 years in the city from 1987 to 1998. The 13th to 14th century de Burgo castle and hall, some 400 metres of town wall, four mural towers and part of a Cromwellian citadel were among the structures recorded during the Galway Excavations Project (GEP), which was established by NUI, Galway's archaeology department.
The bulk of some 28,000 stratified finds date from about 1550 to 1800 and include pottery, glass, clay pipes, bone and stone objects, coins and tokens, architectural fragments, ridge and floor tiles, metal and gold objects, leather and textiles, gaming marbles and canon and musket shot. The authors believe that the book will serve as a useful archive for scholars of urban archaeology, and as a vital resource for displays in the city's new civic museum.
They note that the wealth of finds confirm the "truly European outreach" of Galway in medieval and post-medieval times, and the strong trading links with France, Spain and Portugal.
Archaeological Investigations in Galway City, 1987-1998, edited by Dr Elizabeth Fitpatrick, Ms Madeline O'Brien and Mr Paul Walsh, is published by Wordwell Ltd.