Qualla: Belmullet

Belmullet: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bugfingers, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1958 the Minister for Lands, Erskine Childers, ordered a fence built across a hill near Belmullet. The local workmen refused. The hill, they said, was a fairy place, and they would not run a fence through it. The government tried to find other men to do the job and could not. In the end, the fence was bent around the hill, and Belmullet went into print in The New York Times under the headline 'Ireland Bows to Fairies and Will Shift a Fence.' This is the kind of town Belmullet is. It is also a Gaeltacht of 1,019 people on an isthmus narrow enough that a canal cut through the town centre lets boats pass from Blacksod Bay to Broadhaven Bay in a few minutes.

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Image: Bugfingers | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belmullet: A Mirage in the Desert

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Belmullet was planned. In 1820 the first post office in the wider Erris region opened here on land that had been little more than thatched cabins and bog. The visionary was William Henry Carter, who had inherited the estate by marriage. He hired Patrick Knight, an engineer from C...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Belmullet: The Workhouse and the Famine

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The boom did not last. The Great Famine struck Erris savagely, and the workhouse built on the site of the current hospital filled to overflowing. At the height of the catastrophe, 3,000 starving people were recorded inside its walls. Charles Trevelyan, head of the Treasury in Lon...

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Belmullet: Synge in the Square

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bugfingers (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. John Millington Synge came to Belmullet in 1904 and recorded what he saw with the unflattering clarity that made his name. 'Belmullet in the evening is noisy and squalid, lonely and crowded at the same time and without appeal to the imagination,' he wrote. 'When one has passed si...

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Image: Bugfingers (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Belmullet: Wild Atlantic, Bilingual Town

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Half the people of Belmullet can speak Irish; only four percent use it daily outside the classroom, but the Gaeltacht designation still shapes the town's summer, when language students fill the place. The Áras Inis Gluaire arts centre, opened in 2007, has hosted Mick Flannery and...

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0