CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS May 2022
Some three years ago I came across a badly photocopied page of a magazine article that gave a short history of the Church of Saint Mary’s in Galway. I read it with interest, as I knew the writer and had recently moved to live in the Claddagh. The story of the statue of Our Lady of Galway stood out. One hundred years ago this weekend the restored image was placed in the church with much celebration.
An Italian Madonna.
The writer of the article wrote: “there is one precious link with ‘penal days’ in the present church. It is a 17th century Madonna of the Rosary, a treasured possession of the community and of the people. It is valued, not so much as a work of art, but because its history is closely linked with the penal sufferings of the people in ages gone by. Many people have come to look upon this statue as a symbol of Our Lady’s special protection over Galway. It is a carved Italian Madonna set against a modern mosaic background of brown sails on a crystal blue sea; of kneeling Claddagh people in traditional dress, and Galway’s patron saints, Nicholas, Atracta and Enda”. An inscription helps establish ‘the date and possibly the identity of the donor…: ‘pray for the souls of John Kirwan and Mary his wife, 1683’”.
“In the local history of the period we find that John Kirwan may have been the Galway mayor of 1686. It is possible that the Kirwans presented the statue to the community. Equally possible is the fact that a Dominican brought it … from Naples or Rome with the intention of spreading devotion to the Rosary. We know from tradition and from the records of the Galway Dominicans that a Confraternity had been established early in the 17th century, and that the Claddagh Church was a celebrated center for the Rosary”.
Renewed Persecution
“Towards the end of the 17th century, the mounting pressure of persecution caused another dispersal of the Galway Dominicans. It came about in April 1698 when the Prior, Fr Gregory Ffrench, with Fr Nicholas Blake, refused to leave until they… had removed the statue of the Madonna from its niche for safe keeping. Local tradition holds that they buried the statue and a large bronze bell in the Priory grounds as a pledge of their return”.
Brother Alphonsus’ Notebook.
“For the next century and a half, there is very little record of the Galway Dominicans, and no record to the hidden statue. Brother Alphonsus O’Donoghue, born in 1838, mentions in his notebook that ‘during his lifetime the statue stood on a pedestal inside the (old) Priory door where it remained battered, dingy, and unheeded’”. When Father William Stephens became Prior of the Claddagh in 1921, he noticed and admired the Madonna figure behind the Priory door… On reading the aforesaid notebook, he decided to have the statue restored to its rightful place in the church... During this work a coat of ‘reformation whitewash’ was removed and an undercoat of white enamel was discovered”.
Date to Remember
One hundred years ago, on May 22nd, the writer tells us that ‘the statue of Our Lady of Galway was carried through Claddagh Village in a great procession formed by clergy and people. “In the church of Saint Mary’s on the Hill the congregation prayed and sang while the Madonna was raised to her present place of honour. This public act… was a symbol of the renewal of the people’s faith: …Just as the people were buried for a century and half beneath the heel of the oppressor, so too this statue shared the pangs of burial when the powers of darkness prevailed. When the people began to emerge into the full sunlight of religious and political freedom, this little statue, by the designs of a loving Providence, also came forth from obscurity, giving the people new hope and new courage to shoulder their responsibilities as the proud inheritors of a glorious tradition”
Jordan O’Brien
