Mattie Ganly is one of Ballinasloe's best-known characters. A retired national school teacher, he has given forty or so years of dedicated service to education at St. Grellan's Boys' National School, where he entertained and equipped hundreds of pupils with fascinating and all-round knowledge and skills in matters sport, history, politics, as well as his beloved Irish language. A living encyclopaedia, if not a Ballinasloe "Wiki", Mattie Ganly is an authority on the history and people of Ballinasloe.

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Childhood, for me, is a big misshapen bag of used baler twine. Reach in and pull. You emerge with one tiny string, one little isolated memory, or you pull out a big bunch of entangled twines, a big rigmarole of memories "fite fuaite le céile"...

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Click here to read more about Mattie.

Mattie has kindly put pen to paper to share many of the his memories of Ballinasloe; the people; the places and the stories that go with them. These stories will be added to the website here regularly. You can contact Mattie by sending an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  or via our contact form here.

John Kernan Mullen (1847–1929)

Mullen's life opens in Ballinasloe in the 1840s. The Great Famine "An Gorta Mór" is raging. Although relatively prosperous (Clancarty power at its peak) - two breweries, three mills, the Grand Canal recently opened 1828 linking us to Dublin - Ballinasloe obviously suffers from poverty and emigration... Read More >>