Qualla: Cranmore, Sligo

Cranmore, Sligo: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you walk through Cranmore you can read the recent history of Ireland in the street signs. There is a Yeats Drive, after the poet whose Sligo childhood haunts his greatest work. There is a Geldof Drive, after the Live Aid organiser born in Dublin in 1951. There is a John Fallon Drive, after the local council member and former mayor, whose son Sean Fallon became a Celtic Football Club legend in Glasgow. And there is a Joe McDonnell Drive, named for the IRA volunteer from Belfast who died in the 1981 hunger strike at HM Prison Maze. The estate is a single argument about Irish identity, written in the names of poets and rebels, athletes and benefactors, the local mayor and the international rock star. Cranmore was conceived as a place to live. The street signs gave it a memory.

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Cranmore, Sligo: The Largest in the West

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Cranmore, Sligo: Joe McDonnell

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Cranmore, Sligo: Sean Fallon and the Celtic Connection

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Cranmore, Sligo: The Regeneration

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cr...

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Cranmore, Sligo: An Crann Mor

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 p...

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