13/09/2025
1924 was Ireland's first full year of independence which was not overshadowed by war.
It was hardly a blissful start to nationhood regardless and areas such as Connemara bore the brunt.
The weather in 1924 was exceptionally wet, something which caused a number of difficulties, chief amongst them the saving of hay and turf.
The yield of potatoes and other crops was also affected.
As a result, between January and September 1924, it was reported that as many as 400 young people from the Clifden district went to North America.
Many never returned. Emigration rates to England and Scotland were also high.
Food was also scarce all throughout Connemara.
Oughterard Rural District Council reported in the summer that 75% of the people had no potatoes.
The kelp and fishing industries in Connemara had also been decimated. Even when large hauls of fish were caught, the facilities for curing and distributing them were very poor.
One letter-writer from Carna bemoaned that thousands of herring were dumped in his locality as there were no means of distributing it. The island people were also said to be in particular distress.
The situation was so poor that some private collections were made on behalf of the 'Connemara Distress Fund,' including a Cinderella Dance at the Catholic Commerical Club on O'Connell Street in Dublin.
Despite this, calls for government grants and relief schemes largely went unanswered.
This lack of food and the congested conditions meant that infectious diseases were common. In January, a typhoid outbreak was reported in Renvyle.
One entire family in the area were infected and brought to hospital. The mother of this unnamed family refused to travel the fifty miles to Galway Hospital, instead dying at home. It was stated that the family had been susceptible to disease, having lived on tea and black bread for many months.
Calls for a fever hospital in the region were also rebuffed.
In June, the Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe, introduced the Old Age Pensions Act, which cut the pension by 10%, from 10/= to 9/= further damaging the spending power of the people.
Such conditions ensured that the distillation of poteen, one of the few means of earning money, was common.
In 1924, prohibition was in operation in America and there was a strong anti-alcohol lobby in the Irish government too. Kevin O'Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs, was particularly keen to stamp out excessive drinking and he introduced a draconian bill which allowed bars to open only until 10pm and limited the sale of alcohol to those over the age of 18 for the first time.
An unintended consequence of this legislation was a growth in the already buoyant Connemara poteen trade.
Gardaí attempted to stop such trade and every court sitting in Connemara in 1924 saw attempts to prosecute distillers.
In July 1924, a man known as '"The Poteen King of Connemara" escaped from a house in Lettermullen, and, after an exciting chase was, captured behind a boulder.
Such efforts were not always successful, such as when Gardaí attempted to stop the distribution of poteen at a pattern day in Cill Ciarán in September 1924.
Meeting with stubborn resistance, the guards used their batons to disperse the crowd before retreating to the barracks. They brought one poteen distiller with them who was placed under arrest in the station.
The Irish Independent reported that at 4pm a large crowd, armed with sticks and stones, gathered around the barracks, burst in through the door and broke the windows, before destroying the furniture within and setting the building alight.
The gardai fled, the prisoner was freed and military were called in to restore calm.
The court case which followed was remarkable in that none of the Gardaí were able to give evidence in Irish, despite the area being an almost exclusively Irish-speaking district.
The government, both local and national, were held responsible for the terrible conditions by many letter writers from Connemara.
There was little sympathy for the people in some quarters.
A Mr Lysaght, inspector of Connemara for the local government, stated that reports of fever in the region were exaggerated and that the chief causes of any fever were a lack of cleanliness.
He added that 'the real remedy is migration but people seem unwilling to leave their native heath.'
Other politicians were more open to attempting to improve conditions in Connemara and some development did occur - there were plans afoot in 1924 for an afforestation scheme involving the planting of trees in a vast area stretching from Recess to Spiddal, through the thinly populated interior of Connemara, something which promised hundreds of jobs.
Tourism was also a fledgling industry. The south Connemara Gaeltacht was already receiving a trickle of teachers and students wishing to learn the Irish language, which was officially made compulsory in Irish schools in 1924.
Connemara remained the strongest Irish-speaking region in the country.
For example, Rosmuck was, according to 'Taistealaide,' an Irish-speaking journalist of the Irish Independent, 98% Irish speaking and 37% of its residents spoke no English at all.
Despite this, he noted that none of the Gardaí assigned to the local station spoke fluent Irish.
The same columnist estimated that the area around Oughterard was home to 69% Irish speakers at the time. Inverin was 98% , Spiddal 89% and Clonbur 88%.
West Connemara was primarily English speaking, however. Kylemore Abbey, an English-medium school, was by 1924 gaining a reputation as a prestigious boarding school and was widely advertised in the national papers as the optimum place for girls who were assured of a thorough preparation for university.
Tourism had certainly not reached the heights it would in the decades to come, however, and a journalist named T.W Murphy visited Connemara several times in 1924.
He stated that the 'the inhabitants of this region are wholly unspoilt by the tourist. They showed everywhere in the district that unanticipated hospitality that one cannot find in many places nowadays. They are the very soul of hospitality and nothing is too good for the stranger at the gate.'
One tourist who did make her way to Connemara was Mrs Sinéad de Valera who holidayed in Roundstone in the summer of 1924. Her husband would be released from prison later that year.
Another notable visitor in 1924 was his Highness Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji (better known as Ranji) prince of Nawanager, a small state in north-western India.
He became the first head of state to pay a visit to Ireland. He took a visit to Ballynahinch Castle on the trip, immediately falling in love with the place and buying it to much local excitement.
Ranji was guest of honour at the Roundstone Pony Show that summer and would go on to have a long and fruitful relationship with the region.
The civil war continued to cast a long shadow in 1924. On 28 October, the bodies of five Galway republicans executed in the closing days of the conflict were returned to their families in a gesture of reconciliation.
One of them was Seamus O'Máille (James O'Malley) of Oughterard whose funeral cortege was greeted by a huge crowd in his home town.
Bitterness about the conflict remained, however, and there was a sharp divide between those who supported the government and those who viewed it as a sworn enemy.
In more positive news, Galway won the All-Ireland hurling title played in September 1924 (although this was officially the 1923 final, delayed by the conflict of the previous year) although there do not seem to have been any Connemara players on the panel.
There were also a number of artists using Connemara as their muse at this time and Paul Henry, one of the most influential landscape painters of the twentieth century, painted 'Sunny Day, Connemara' in 1924. Killary Bay by the same artist was also painted in this year.
A home-grown artist of a different kind, Liam O'Flaherty of the Aran islands, released a collection of short stories in this year and would soon go on to national acclaim.
1924 drew to a close with a fierce storm battering Connemara, perhaps a fitting end to yet another turbulent year.
For more stories of life in Galway and the west of Ireland, see my book 'The Little History of Galway.' In all good bookshops or pick up a signed copy at:
https://www.etsy.com/ie/listing/1867494645/little-history-galway-ireland-colm8.htm
Picture of some boys on Inishmaan, taken in 1924. From the Folklore Collection.
