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Patrick Tunney was a poet and songwriter from Cushlough, Westport. Over his lifetime he penned and published over one hundred and twenty songs and poems which have been recited, recorded and performed many times. He wrote about life at the time in poems such as ‘Drummin long ago’, ‘The Widow from Mayo’, ‘I bought my […]

An Appreciation – Mr. Thaddeus Walsh To the ‘Mayo News’ Patrick Tunney. Cushlough, August, 1931. Whenever we reflect on days gone by we always find that some of our best friends and associates have, also, gone to other spheres – one by one they have passed away, therefore, whilst fate bades us to sojourn here and enable […]

MEMORIES OF THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM By PATRICK TUNNEY In the throes of fear, terror and anxiety, the year 1920 dawned throughout Ireland, with the death of Terence McSweeney, the burning of the Loughnane Brothers, Galway, the assassination of Mayor O’Callaghan. Limerick; Canon Magner. Cork; Peadar Clancy and Dick McKee at Dublin Castle; Tom Ashe […]

Westport Remembers the MEN of 1916 Old I.R.A Veterans Warmly Applauded On Parade Route The rising sun on Easter Sunday morning leapt joyfully in full, brilliant radiance as Westport prepared to stage the County Commemorative Celebrations on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Rising. And at Westport Quay the bright, warm sun cast deep shadows […]

Westport and the Irish Volunteers 1916 Vincent Keane By 1916 Westport was a well-established battalion in the Mayo Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. Westport was given Battalion status and the various outlying companies became attached to the battalion. Natural leaders were now coming to the fore and a true patriotic Irish-Ireland ethos was emerging. Names […]

Major John MacBride Owen Hughes One of the first effects of the 1916 Rising was the creation of a political revolution which, under the Sinn Féin organisation, gave an overwhelming majority to nationalist Ireland in the General Election of 1918 for self-determination, which led to withdrawal from the British House of Commons and the setting […]

Major John MacBride Speech by President Éamon de Valera on the occasion of the unveiling of a Commemorative plaque to Major John MacBride on his birthplace at the Quay, Westport, on 4 August 1963. This house is now the premises known as ‘The Helm’, owned by Mr. Vincent Keogh. It is said that there is […]

Major John MacBride A Review For 2016 Anthony J. Jordan “The veracity of the charges against MacBride, has attracted some historiographical attention in recent years, largely as a result of the energetic writings of Anthony Jordan, The target of Jordan’s argument has been a number of biographies of W. B. Yeats, particularly Roy Foster’s… The […]

The Rising and my Dismissal. Elizabeth Bloxham I was in the North when I read news of the Rising in the Evening Telegraph. Though I knew from a talk I had with MacDonagh the previous summer that things were coming to a head I was shocked into a state of unreality by the bald report […]