Comerford House in Galway looks neglected, but all is not lost … yet

Comerford House … looking a little neglected beside Spanish Arch in Galway (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

I spent much of yesterday [12 June 2019] with family members and cousins visiting Galway. Our walking tour of the city brought us through Eyre Square, to Saint Nicholas’s Collegiate Church, Shop Street, Kirwan Lane, Lynch’s Castle, Blake’s Castle, the King’s Head and the Spanish Arch, as well as many other historic sites in the centre of the city.

There was music and lively busking on the streets, and it was good to show first-time visitors to Galway from England that the ‘West is Awake.’ But it was sad to see the sorry, neglected state of Comerford House, beside Spanish Arch and the banks of the River Corrib, which was donated to Galway City by the Comerford family many years ago and which, for a time, had been the home of the Galway City Museum.

Spanish Arch, a 16th century part of the city walls, between Comerford House and the River Corrib (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Comerford House, beside the Spanish Arch in Galway, was home to the Comerford family for a number of generations before being donated to Galway Corporation. It has been an award-winning city museum and the name of Comerford House recalls close links between Galway City and the Comerford family.

William James Valentine Comerford, a solicitor from Tuam, Co Galway, was born in 1903. He qualified as a solicitor in February 1924, and started to practice in Tuam as Henry Concanon & Co. In 1954, he moved the practice to 9 William Street, Galway. At that time, he was in partnership with Frank Meagher.

William Comerford was also a well-known local historian in Co Galway, and he believed his branch of the Comerford family was descended from the Comerford family of Inchiholohan, Co Kilkenny. His historical papers included: ‘Some notes on the Borough of Tuam and its records, 1817-1822,’ in the Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, vol 15, Nos 3 and 4 (No 19), pp 97-120 (no date, ca 1932-1933), and he was a founding member of the Old Tuam Society in 1942. He was the author also of an unpublished autobiography, ‘Harp sheds Crown.’

Bill Comerford moved to Comerford House, beside the Spanish Arch, in the 1950s, but when he retired in the 1970s he moved to Dublin, where he died.

Bill Comerford married Elizabeth Meagher and their children included: Dr Francis Rory Comerford, Vice-Dean of the Medical Faculty at University College Galway (now National University of Ireland Galway), and the father of Judge Francis Comerford, President to the Circuit Court; and Henry Comerford (1936-2016), a well-known Galway solicitor, a member of the Radio Éireann Players, who had two plays produced in the Peacock Theatre, and a Fine Gael candidate in the 1981 General Election.

Comerford House in Galway forms part of a National Monument site, the Galway City Walls, which is within a ‘Zone of Archaeological Notification.’

Comerford House in Galway is a detached three-bay, two-storey house with an attic storey, and was built ca 1800 as a private residence. It has a full-height, projecting square-plan entrance bay and a later flat roofed single-bay two-storey addition to south-west end of the façade.

Galway’s old City Wall forms a boundary to the small yard behind the house, and the south-west end of house is built onto and incorporates two of the northern arches of Spanish Arch, one of a series of arches of mediaeval gateways.

The Venetian-style windows at the end bays date from 1947. The entrance doorway has a carved limestone doorcase that includes panelled pilasters with plinths, a supporting moulded lintel and an open-bed pediment with a plain fanlight, and a replacement timber panelled door. The square-headed door at the addition has fluted flanking piers with plinths, and one pier retains a finial with acanthus leaves and a barley-sugar cone.

Clare Sheridan, a sculptor and cousin of Winston Churchill, lived in the house from 1948 to 1952 and converted one room into a private chapel. The doorcase came from Ardfry House.

A flood warning on the walls of Comerford House, close to Galway Bay (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The Connacht Tribune reported late last year [17 September 2018] that unless Fáilte Ireland came up with at least €5 million towards the refurbishment and extension of the Galway City Museum into Comerford House and onto the top of the Spanish Arch, the flagship 2020 project would be dead in the water.

The cost of the project is significant because of the complexity of the site beside Spanish Arch, which is a national monument, Comerford House, which is a listed building and the River Corrib and looking out onto Galway Bay.

Graffiti on the corner of the walls of the house in the name of Extinction Rebellion warns how global warming and rising waters in the River Corrib and Galway Bay threaten the future of Comerford House.

However, there was some good news at Comerford House yesterday. A year-old site notice by Galway City Council on the building outlines the latest plans for Comerford House that include refurbishing the house, providing exhibition spaces, visitor and staff facilities, flood protection measures, a new attic storey, a new three-storey building north of Comerford House that would provide additional space for exhibitions, storage and visitors to Galway Museum, as well as new landscaping for Museum Square and in front of Comerford House, Spanish Arch and the Fish Market.

All hope is not yet lost for Comerford House in Galway.

Comerford House in Galway was built an attic storey, and was built ca 1800 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

‘The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East’: a book review

The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East

John Eibner (ed), Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018, pp 276. ISBN 978-14985-6196-9

A new report commissioned by the British Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, shows that the persecution of Christians is pervasive in parts of the Middle East, sometimes amounting to genocide, and has prompted an exodus in the past two decades. Millions of Christians have been uprooted from their homes throughout the Middle East, and many have been killed, kidnapped, imprisoned and discriminated against. The report also highlights discrimination across south-east Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and in east Asia – often driven by state authoritarianism.

The interim report is based on work by Bishop Philip Mounstephen of Truro, makes for sobering reading. It says ‘the inconvenient truth’ is ‘the overwhelming majority (80%) of persecuted religious believers are Christians.’

The Christian population in the Middle East and North Africa stood at 20% a century ago. In recent years, this proportion has fallen to less than 4%, or roughly 15 million people. In countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia the situation of Christians and other minorities has reached an alarming stage, according to the report. The Arab-Israeli conflict has caused the majority of Palestinian Christians to leave their homeland, so that the population of Palestinian Christians has dropped from 15% to 2%.

For people reflecting on reports such as this, it is all the more disturbing that the persecuted and persecutor all share religious belief-systems that not only share so much in common but all three major monotheistic religions originated in the fertile crescent of the Middle East.

What is the future for religious minorities in the Middle East?

Do they have a future?

These are questions that have been asked in Constantinople and throughout the Middle East since the seventh century. But perhaps, as Taner Akçam of Clark University points out, modern ‘ethnic cleansing’ can be traced to the genocide of Armenians in 1915, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the forced ‘population exchanges’ between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s.

These questions are asked yet again in a fresh way in a new book edited by John Eibner, a Swiss-American historian who is runs the Middle East programmes of the human rights organisation Christian Solidarity International (CSI). He has brought together essays by 20 scholars, journalists, human rights activists and political practitioners who spoke in Switzerland and the US on the topic. Now they have been published together in book form.

The contributors are from diverse political, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Each draws a deep wellspring of scholarship and experience as they seek to understand the threat to religious minorities and social pluralism. The one Irish contributor is the journalist Patrick Cockburn; the one Anglican is Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali.

The future of religious minorities in the Middle East is an issue for more than Christians and Muslims. Jewish communities have all but vanished apart from within Israel. Groups such as the Alawites, the Yezidis, Druze, Kakais and Mandaeans, like Christians, struggle for survival.

In recent years, the West has focused on the threats posed by jihadist terrorism. But the delicate fabric of inter-communal relations in the Middle East has been unravelling for the past century, at the expense of religious and ethnic minorities.

As early as 2011, CSI was warning of a genocide against religious minorities and called for action. The warning followed similarly dramatic appeals by then president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, and the former president of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel, one of the contributors to this collection. At the time, the warning was scarcely heeded. Yet, since then, the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) carried out a systemic genocide, targeting Christians, Yazidis, and Shi'ite Muslims

During a recent visit to Tangier, when I visited churches and synagogues in the Moroccan port city, I tried to convince myself that there is still hope in the Middle East and North Africa. In these papers, some of the contributors still express hope for the future, but others view the situation more pessimistically. As John Eibner writes, there are few ‘silver linings around the dark clouds … the future is grim indeed.’

Patrick Comerford
Askeaton

This book review is published in the current edition of ‘Search: A Church of Ireland Journal’ (Vol 42.2, Summer 2019), pp 151-152.

This biographical note is included on p 155:

Patrick Comerford is priest-in-charge of Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin (Diocese of Limerick & Killaloe), Precentor of Limerick and Killaloe cathedrals, and a former Foreign Desk Editor of The Irish Times.