Qualla: Tuam Town Hall

Tuam Town Hall: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Theasby, CC BY-SA 2.0. Stand in Market Square in Tuam and the most striking building is not a cathedral or a castle but a town hall: a six-bay neoclassical frontage in coursed limestone, with a four-stage clock tower at one end capped by an octagonal lantern. James Joseph Boylan designed it. The builder Andrew Egan put it up in coursed limestone, completed it in 1857. Sixty-three years later, in July 1920, the Black and Tans set it on fire in retribution for the killing of two policemen in an ambush nearby. The fire gutted the inside but the shell stayed standing. By 1926 the building was fully restored to Boylan's original lines, the clock still on the tower, the lantern still on top.

Read more: Tuam Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Neil Theasby | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tuam Town Hall: Before the Hall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. There had been a market house on the southwest side of the square since 1700. It was a small arcaded structure - open on the ground floor so the country people could sell their produce out of the weather, with an assembly room above for the use of Tuam Corporation. The Corporatio...

Read more: Tuam Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tuam Town Hall: Boylan's Design

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, CC BY 2.0. The town hall Boylan drew is a careful piece of Victorian classicism. The main block is five bays wide, with mullioned and architraved windows on both floors. The right-hand bay, faced in ashlar stone rather than coursed rubble, carries the four-stage tower, flanked by full-heigh...

Read more: Tuam Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States | CC BY 2.0

Tuam Town Hall: Burned

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, CC BY 2.0. On 19 July 1920, in the bitter middle of the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Republican Army ambushed and killed two Royal Irish Constabulary officers near Tuam. The reprisal was immediate and brutal. Police auxiliaries, the Black and Tans, set the town hall on fire along wi...

Read more: Tuam Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States | CC BY 2.0

Tuam Town Hall: Plaques

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, CC BY 2.0. Four plaques have been added to the front of the building in the decades since. The first, installed after John Waldron's death in 1987, commemorates the local historian. In 1998 two more went up: one for the Christian socialist and philanthropist Robert Malachy Burke, who had di...

Read more: Tuam Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States | CC BY 2.0

Tuam Town Hall: Where the March Began

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, CC BY 2.0. On 26 August 2018, more than a thousand people gathered at the town hall before walking, in a slow vigil, to the site of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home a few hundred yards away. The timing was deliberate: while Pope Francis was celebrating Mass in Phoenix Park in Dublin dur...

Read more: Tuam Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States | CC BY 2.0