The history of this, our town, seems to stop at 1820 and restart again in 1984 when, at the urging of historian Tom O'Neill, the city fathers decided to celebrate the 500th year of the city's Royal Charter in style. In fact, it seems to me that in that extraordinary year the people of Galway woke up to the fact that they had a history, or even a town, for the first time. When, in the spring of that year, a committee got itself together and had a hugely succcessful Street Festival in the High Street/Quay Street are, there was a significant body of the population that didn't know where High Street, Quay Street or Cross Street was. As far as they were concerned, Galway stopped at Anthony Ryan's Drapery Shop or, if pushed to it, Griffins Bakery.

Before that quintessential year, the histiography of Galway was limited to two main texts, James Hardiman's seminal "History of Galway" and Donovan O'Sullivan's "Old Galway - The Story of a Norman Town", both of them excellent histories in their own right, but the former stopped in 1820, naturally enough as that was the year it was first published, and the latter concentrated on the Norman period of the town's history. The 1984 celebrations sparked off a couple of excellent additions to this such as Diarmuid O'Cearbhaill's "Town and Gown" and Gerard Moran's "Galway History and Society". However, both of these were collections of essays and, as such, were selective in their subject matter.

There have been other books relating to Galway's history such as the several volumes of Peadar O'Dowd, including his history of the Claddagh in which the 19th Century features strongly, Jim Murray's "History of Medicine in Galway" and Tim Collin's story of the Galway Steamship Company in the 1850s. Kieran Woodman has been ploughing a lone furrow with histories of the Chamber of Commerce, the Harbour Board and, more recently, Aviation in Galway. There have been some biographies of notable Galwegians, several individual volumes relating to different aspects of life in the town but, to date, there hasn't been a volume that has told the story of Galway since the Act of Union was passed in 1800 and which is the period that made Galway what it is today and therefore one of tremendous interest to its inhabitants.

The publication, this week, of "A Town Tormented By The Sea: Galway, 1790-1914" written by John Cunningham and published by Geography Publications goes a long way to fill this gap. The work itself was originally a doctoral thesis presented to the Department of History here in Galway a couple of years ago and now re-fashioned for the general public. It is probably the most important publication of Galway's history since Donovan O'Sullivan's "Old Galway" in 1942 and is greatly to be welcomed.

The book begins at the end. Cunningham opens his narrative with the following paragraph:
   "Galway entered the 20th century at a low ebb, its population falling, its economy declining, its buildings collapsing. 'The Citie of the Tribes' was no longer officially a city and its so-called tribes, with their fortunes and influence, were thoroughly dispersed. For those few who had been striving to reverse Galway's decline, the publication of the Census of 1911 brought further bad news. It showed that the urban population had decreased, for the sixth successive decade, to a mere 13,255. The city had incontrovertibly become a town - it might yet be a village."

There follows a nine page foreword in which we are given a bleak picture of the state of Galway during the first 14 years of the century. With somewhat laconic humour, in Chapter One, the author proceeds to tell us that things hadn't been much better a hundred years earlier as he introduces us to the political struggle between James Daly of Dunsandle and the Galway Independents during the 1812 Election for Westminster. Using this election as a platform, Cunningham describes the reality of life in Galway at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There are fascinating insights into the life of the people and the harshness of their day to day existence with the Great Famine acting as a terrible catalyst in the 1840s.

In the second part we follow the same formula to describe life in Galway after the Famine, with the emphasis on Social and Labour Protest, while the third part deals with the religious, cultural and educational life of the town from 1790 to 1914. The research is meticulous, the narration wonderfully clear, but the magic of this book is that it gives present day Galwegians a real sense of their own historic foundations and just how fragile and recent those foundations are. If the full value of this message is taken on board, then John Cunningham will have done this 'town tormented by the sea' a great service indeed and fully deserves the nomenclature of Doctor of History.

Of course, this important volume also begs the important question: How did Galway move from the decayed state it was in at the beginning of the 20th century to be able to claim by century's end that it was the fastest growing city in Europe? Roll on Volume 2.