When John Coyle came to live at the Spanish Arch in the summer of 1974, his neighbours were fishermen and coopers and he used to moor his little Galway hooker within sight of his front door.
A blow-in from Salthill, John and his new wife Sally were welcomed into a community of hard-working families and into a neighbourhood that, on the face of it at least, is completely different today.
These days, thousands of tourists traipse the cobble stones of the Spanish Arch in Galway each day. The nearby Long Walk, a scenic promenade along the docks towards Galway Bay, has been transformed from a neighbourhood of tenements and working-class homes into one of the most desirable locations in the city.
Indeed, the word “city” has little relevance to the residents of the Long Walk, now or in the past. To them, Galway is a town and Spanish Arch is part of a local neighbourhood.
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“It was a very different place back then, it was dockland. We had lovely neighbours; they were mainly fishermen or people associated with that. One of our neighbours, Michael Walsh, was a cooper who made barrels,” remembers John.
“It was a very simple area but it was not popular. They were humble times. There was a pub here, Greene’s, and he [Peter Greene] was the mayor of the town for a long time. Behind that there were tenements. The town was poor.
“The place has been gentrified, but the core is still here. We know one another, their children know our children. There is a neighbourhood feeling about being here.”
In a time before mass tourism, before Druid and the Galway Arts Festival, the area around the Spanish Arch looked very different.
“Quay Street and High Street, you could have bought them up for nothing back then. Tigh Neachtain’s was there and it hasn’t changed. Across the road was the Quays Pub, which was only occasionally open, when they could afford stock,” says John.
“Down the road there was old ladies who served soup and crubeens [pig’s feet]. Up the road you had Kenny’s, but there was very little else. Tourism was Salthill.“
But that changed 20 years ago. You started to get shops selling Aran jumpers, according to John, and now it can be hard to move up and down the street.
“There are lots and lots of people, but there is no fighting. No real drunkenness. People are well behaved and happy. Maybe they can have a bit too much [to drink], but they can carry it. There is something about the town and visitors that is relaxed. People just enjoy it.”
I don’t know what they were smoking, but they smoked a lot of it
— John Coyle
For many years, the Spanish Arch had a reputation as a place for unofficial merriment, a spot where empty bottles of Buckfast were as common as the hungry seagulls scouting for leftover chips from McDonagh’s, but according to John, those days have largely passed.
“I remember some time back in the 1990s, the place was full of tents. People would come to Galway from the continent and they would pitch up tents during the summer,” he said.
“The corporation [Galway City Council] tolerated them, maybe they didn’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what they were smoking, but they smoked a lot of it. At the end of the summer, the people were so zonked out that they had to be taken away and detoxed.
“People used to sit out there on the [sea] wall and drink all night. That has stopped too, I don’t know why. I think people’s habits have changed, young people drink less these days, so that has calmed the area down.”
A few metres from John’s front door sits Ard Bia, one of Ireland’s most well-known and enduring food destinations. Proprietor Aoibheann McNamara, herself a former resident of the Long Walk, feels that there is something special in this part of Galway, something that needs to be protected.
“For me, this feels like this is where we have always been. People come here because it is scenic and because of the Spanish Arch, but people also now come for Ard Bia. So it is a two-way thing,” she says.
“I used to live on the Long Walk, it was the most spectacular place to live. It was a bit tough, but an amazing place. I was bringing up a two-year-old son there, which wasn’t easy. You had the front door, then a road, then the Corrib, which is the fastest-running river in Ireland, and then the Atlantic Ocean.”
On the exterior wall of Ard Bia, Finnish artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta have installed a permanent LED light installation that tracks rising sea levels. Indeed, according to Aoibheann, the effects of climate change are already being felt on the Spanish Arch and the Long Walk.
“Of course the flooding is getting worse. They [Galway City Council] put up the desperate orange barricade [an inflatable flood barrier] because a proper, permanent flood protection hasn’t been built. So we are stuck with this awful thing for six months of the year,” she says.
“But still, flooding is an inevitability. Almost every winter it happens. We have no insurance, but still we carry on. We could be flooded in the morning at 5am and still we would be open for lunch at 11am.
“It’s not easy but it is part of our life now. We don’t know where the flood will come from. The water could come from the Long Walk and the barrier could be in another place. One time it came from the docks and we were flooded as bad as we have ever been flooded, in about 10 minutes. We are in the front line of this.
The sheer volume of people looking to eat, I should be delighted but I’m not that delighted
— Aoibheann McNamara
“But where we are really does matter to me. This place is our home now, so we keep going. But certainly, it is a concern. This [climate change] isn’t something that is going to happen; it is happening now.”
Despite the deep-rooted community that exists in this part of Galway, Aoibheann believes that the sheer volume of tourists is becoming an issue and that the town may be in danger of losing the thing that makes it special.
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“We need to be very careful. You have a lot of generic shops selling generic things. You have the situation with Airbnb and a housing crisis. There is a tipping of the balance which is not good and I can see it happening in Galway,” she says.
“The volume of visitors is phenomenal. It is becoming almost too much for Ard Bia. The sheer volume of people looking to eat, I should be delighted but I’m not that delighted.
“It is a lot to deal with and keep the standards up. We had to shut down tables because things were too much and we were losing who we were.
“It is a very scary thing to lose the thing that you love. We have to be careful, we have to be mindful.
“People are not going to Italy and Greece any more, they are coming to Ireland in their droves. This year might be the last year that people are stupid enough to go south because of the heat. The droves are coming. We need to think more about what we are offering them.”
