Cranmore is the largest housing estate in the west of Ireland: 511 houses built in five phases between the early 1970s and 1985. It rises on the eastern side of Sligo town between the Cranmore Road and the Cleveragh Road. The estate has its own population - approximately 1,600 to 1,700 people, living in around 494 occupied houses. That is more people than live in Ballymote or Tubbercurry, both of which are nominally counted as towns in their own right. Cranmore is not a town. It is a single planned estate, designed and built in phases to provide local authority housing during a period when Sligo, like many Irish provincial centres, was struggling with poor stock and rising demand. It has been home to thousands of families across two generations.

Joe McDonnell was born in Belfast in 1951 and joined the Provisional IRA. He was arrested and imprisoned in the H-Blocks of HM Prison Maze. In 1981, after Bobby Sands began the hunger strike protest against the removal of Special Category Status for political prisoners, McDonnell joined him. McDonnell died on 8 July 1981, after sixty-one days without food. He was thirty years old. He left behind a wife and two children. The naming of Joe McDonnell Drive in Cranmore - the estate is overwhelmingly nationalist in sympathy - was an act of solidarity. It said that here in Sligo, in a corner of the Irish republic, the death of a Belfast prisoner was their death too. The drive still bears the name. The houses on it have been rebuilt and the original block demolished, but the sign goes back up each time.

John Fallon, after whom John Fallon Drive is named, served as a councillor and as mayor of Sligo. His son Sean Fallon left Sligo as a young man in the 1940s and joined Glasgow Celtic, where he became one of the club's most loved players and later assistant manager. As a coach, he discovered the young Kenny Dalglish in 1967 and brought him to Celtic - a single act that would shape British football for decades. Sean Fallon is buried in Glasgow. His father's name lies on a road sign in Cranmore. The Sligo connection to Glasgow Celtic runs deep: Brother Walfrid, who founded the club in 1887, was born near Ballymote, twenty miles south. Cranmore's soccer pitch is called Sean Fallon Park, an ongoing tribute to a Sligo man whose football life was conducted nine hundred miles away.

Cranmore has had hard years. Three brutal murders remain unsolved on the estate - two men gunned down, a third attacked with a hatchet. There have been drug seizures, gun attacks on the houses of suspected dealers, and ten CCTV cameras funded under the RAPID programme to deter crime. The narrative of the estate has too often been told by these incidents. The reality is more complex. The Cranmore Community Cooperative Society runs youth clubs, education programmes, women's groups, men's groups, a senior citizens club, and ten resident associations. The estate has soccer pitches, basketball courts, and proximity to the Sligo Sports Complex. The Cranmore Regeneration Project has worked for years to rebuild blocks, replace older units with new housing, and bring private investment alongside the local authority stock. The estate that once had O'Dwyer Court and Benson Drive - both demolished in 2009 - is steadily being remade.

The Irish name is An Crann Mor, the Great Tree. It refers to a large tree that once stood on this land, before the estate was conceived. Sligo town spread eastward in the second half of the twentieth century, and what had been farmland and pasture became, in five quick building phases, a town within a town. The estate has never had quite the institutional anchor of an older quarter - no medieval church, no Norman castle, no monastery ruin. Its history is the history of late twentieth-century Irish urban planning: the rapid building, the gradual decline, the regeneration projects, the slow rebuilding of community. The street names are how Cranmore claims its place in a longer story. A poet, a rock star, a hunger striker, a footballer's father. Walk the drives and read the signs. The estate has been writing its own history since 1972, in the only available alphabet.