Afternoon Walking Tour of Galway City's West End

Begin at the Claddagh, one of Galway’s oldest Gaelic settlements. Here you’ll learn about its origins, traditions, language, and unique customs — standing across the river from the old Norman walls that once excluded them.

Here we stand before the statue of Father Thomas Nicholas Burke, Galway’s famed 19th-century Dominican preacher. Burke became a national figure for defending Irish Catholicism against English critics like John Thomas Froude in 1872, and for giving voice to the poor and oppressed under British rule. He was the voice of Catholic resistance in the 19th century. Half a century later, Father Michael Griffin would become its martyr — murdered by Crown forces during the War of Independence in 1920. Together, Burke and Griffin show how Galway’s priests embodied faith, defiance, and the struggle for Ireland’s identity across generations.

At the Small Crane, outside of one of Galway’s great traditional pubs, we explore how music and storytelling carried Irish identity through centuries of hardship. Sessions of fiddles, pipes, and bodhráns were never just entertainment — they were acts of defiance. When the Irish language was beaten out of children in schools, it survived in ballads that told of rebellions the history books ignored, and in tunes that carried messages of resistance across generations. Here, through music, the Irish spirit endured when every other voice was silenced.

Standing at the River Corrib — one of Europe’s fastest flowing rivers. Here we uncover how Irish industry was harnessed to serve a colonial neighbour. For centuries its waters powered mills that tied Galway into the empire, producing goods not for local need but for export to the markets of Britain. The Corrib became a tool of colonial economy — Galway’s strength flowing outward, leaving its people weakened at home.

Outside Galway’s Courthouse, we uncover how justice once served the empire rather than the people. Here famine victims, land agitators, and rebels were tried under foreign laws, often in a language they could not even speak. These English-only trials reveal how the courts became another weapon of colonial power — leaving a legacy that shaped Ireland’s struggle for identity and self-determination.

Galway Cathedral, built in the 1960s on the site of the old city jail, marked the moment when Catholicism, once suppressed under English rule, took precedence in independent Ireland. Its soaring dome and vast stonework symbolise the faith’s triumphal return — a reminder of how power shifted, and how religion came to shape the new nation’s identity.

From here we walk towards Nun’s Island, where we face a chapter of Galway’s past in which women lost their freedom to the Magdalene laundries. Behind high walls, they endured silence, shame, and forced labour. The laundries confined those judged for poverty or pregnancy, forcing them into unpaid work under the guise of morality. It was silence enforced by faith and sanctioned by the state — a reminder that oppression in Ireland did not end with foreign rule.

Our tour ends at the University of Galway, founded by the British Crown in 1849 to anglicise the West and produce English-speaking elites. Here we explore how, at its opening, Irish was still the everyday language of Galway’s people — yet the new college offered not a single class in it, a deliberate attempt at erasure. Today the story has turned: over 3,000 students study through Irish each year, the university partners with the Gaeltacht in Connemara, and it leads global research in Irish literature, folklore, and culture. What began as a colonial project to silence a people has become one of the strongest voices in reviving and expanding Irish identity.