Galway (barony)

Galway (Irish: Gaillimh[1]) is a barony in Ireland, comprising the city of Galway and parts of the surrounding county of Galway.[1][2] It is coterminous with the former County of the Town of Galway,[3] a county corporate created by the town's 1610 charter and abolished by the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898.[2]

Boundary

The town's 1672 charter defined the corporate county's extent as the municipal borough of Galway and its "liberties" for two miles around.[2] About 1770 the county bounds were extended,[2] and in 1871 the census gave its area as 22,483 acres (9,099 ha).[3] The 1846 Parliamentary Gazetteer describes its bounds as roughly a semicircle with a radius of 4 miles (6.4 km) centred on Galway town, with Galway Bay to the south, from Forramoyle in the west, through Lough Inch to the southern shore of Lough Corrib in the north, then southeast to the north of Killeen, and down to the bay 1​1⁄2 miles east of Merlin Park.[4]

Galway town became a county borough in 1985,[5] and a city under the Local Government Act 2001.[6] Its administrative area of 5,000 hectares (12,360 acres) is less than that of the barony.[7]

Divisions

The barony contains 111 townlands.[1] These are in three civil parishes: all of the parish of St Nicholas, covering the centre city; most of Rahoon, to the west; and about half of Oranmore, to the east.[1][4]

Government

Whereas Galway Corporation governed the borough, a separate grand jury had a parallel authority over the whole county of the town.[2] The Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840 abolished the borough and its corporation, but not the county and its grand jury.[n 1] The town commissioners who governed the town after the Corporation's abolition petitioned in 1878 to have the town boundary extended to the limits of the county of the town.[10] This did not happen.

Footnotes
  1. The Parliamentary Gazetteer of 1846 erroneously claimed that the county of the town had been abolished under the 1840 act and divided into the "borough of Galway" and the "barony of Galway".[4] While such a division happened in six other corporate counties in 1840,[8] in Galway it was the borough which was abolished rather than the county.[9]

Sources
  • "Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840". The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol.XV Part II. Her Majesty's Printer's. 1840. pp. 599–669. ISBN 9780331531558. Retrieved 31 July 2013.

References
  1. "Gaillimh/Galway". Placenames Database of Ireland. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
  2. Kennedy, Patrick J. (1963). "The County of the Town of Galway". Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society. Galway Archaeological & Historical Society. 30 (3/4): 90–102. JSTOR 25535406.
  3. "Area, houses, and population in 1841, 1851, 1861, and 1871, of each barony, also the general valuation in 1871". Census of Ireland 1871: Vol IV, No. 1: County of Galway. Command papers. Cd.6052. HMSO. p. 9, Table III, footnote (b). The county of the town of Galway is co-extensive with the barony of Galway
  4. "Galway". The Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland adapted to the new Poor-Law, Franchise, Municipal and Ecclesiastical arrangements ... as existing in 1844–45. Vol. II: D–M. Dublin: A. Fullarton & Co. 1846. pp. 237–8.
  5. "Local Government (Reorganisation) Act, 1985, Section 5". Irish Statute Book. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
  6. "Local Government Act, 2001, Section 10". Irish Statute Book. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
  7. "Table 6 Population of each province, county, city, urban area, rural area and electoral division, 2006 and 2011" (PDF). Census of Ireland 2011, Vol. 1. CSO. 2012. p. 100. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
  8. Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840; §21 and Schedule A
  9. Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840; §13 and Schedule B
  10. Local Government Board for Ireland (1878). Sixth report with appendices. Command papers. C.2116. Dublin: Alexander Thom for HMSO. pp. 30–31.
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