Qualla: Doohoma

Doohoma: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1841, the parish census recorded 455 people living at Doohoma. Ten years later there were 218. The Great Famine had cut the population in half. There was no formal cemetery; the dead were buried in the sandbanks above the shore, in graves the wind sometimes uncovered. Local people asked the authorities for a proper graveyard. They were refused. They asked again. They were refused again. Finally, in 1926 - 75 years after the Famine had ended - three hundred local men gathered on the sandbanks and built a sod wall around the burial ground themselves. The bishop came down from Killala to consecrate it. The Mayo County Council eventually granted enough money for a stone wall to replace the sod. The road to the cemetery had to wait until 1967, when over a hundred volunteers built it by hand. The council paved it for the first time in 1989. This is how things get done at Doohoma.

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Doohoma: The Edge of the Continent

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Boholaman at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Doohoma is a thumb of land jutting into the Atlantic on the northwest coast of Kiltane Parish in Erris, fifteen miles southwest of Bangor Erris. From the western beaches you look out across Blacksod Bay toward the long line of the Mullet Peninsula; to the south, on a clear day, y...

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Image: Boholaman at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Doohoma: Tattie Hokers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michelle Owner of the Squishy from Denver, CC BY 2.0. Fishing alone could not sustain Doohoma. So every June, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth, whole families left for Scotland to dig potatoes. They were known as 'tattie hokers' - tattie being Scots for potato, hoking being the Donegal-Mayo ...

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Image: Michelle Owner of the Squishy from Denver | CC BY 2.0

Doohoma: The Documentary and the Returns

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Comhar, Public domain. In the 1970s, the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ produced a documentary called simply 'Doohoma' that dealt with the emigration of young men from the village to England and the effect on the families they left behind. The film captured something true about Erris in that era - the ...

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Image: Comhar | Public domain

Doohoma: What the Coast Gives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hootsmac, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1972, a man named Padraig Coyle founded Eagle Isle Seafoods at Doohoma, smoking wild Atlantic salmon for export. It was the first real industry the village had ever had. In 1987, the council financed a £2 million water scheme that piped fresh water from Carrowmore Lake to hous...

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Image: Hootsmac | CC BY-SA 4.0