A photograph of Saint Patrick’s old church on Forster Street in Galway. The church has a magnificent high bell tower, and about a third of the way up this tower, there is an ornate statue of Saint Patrick. There are metal railings in front of the church, and the church has a metal front gate. There are statues of angels on the pillars of the gate. There is a streetlight near the gate, and electrical wires run from it to a pole in the church grounds. Interestingly, there is also a second streetlight post, suggesting that the second photo below predates this one. The church was open for worship in 1837, but two years later, on the night of the ‘Big Wind’, the roof was blown off. Fr Bartholomew Roche, the parish priest, had to raise the cost of the repairs, which allowed the church to reopen on the 11th of January 1842. The church was replaced in 1972 by a new structure located directly to the right of the old buildings.
The second photo is similar in nature. However, there are a number of minor subtle differences. A thatch cottage is visible to the right of the front gate, the angels are missing from the pillars, and the streetlamp is of a different design, but there is evidence of this in the first photo. Interestingly, a similar streetlamp to the one in the second photo exists to this day on Prospect Hill, outside the business premises of Keane Mahony-Smith. The horizontal iron crossbar is where the lamp-lighter placed his ladder while lighting the lamp.
The final photo is of the church now in 2026. A shadow of its former glory, the church building was renovated in the late 1970s, after the new church building was built and commenced parish duties. The remains of the bell tower were removed during these renovations, and the slanted tiled roof was replaced with a flat membrane roof. Unfortunately, during these renovations, the statue of St Patrick was severely damaged by a crane, and its lower half was subsequently removed, leaving it lost to history. The flat roof was never maintained over the years, and the building is now condemned, housing just a range of old Catholic books and literature from across the diocese.