The Gallaghers of Ballinrobe

Uncle Tom relaxes in a field in Ballinrobe in this photo
from 1931. His brother Owen remembered Tom being
stronger working with his mind than on the farm.
However, Tom was no stranger to manual labor,
including his work in a Delaware shipyard in the 1940s.
almost certainly more than his parents would have. And it
would have been more rigorous than what children today
are familiar with. We don’t know what books were
available, but Uncle Tom as a boy had a couple comic
books featuring the American cowboy-movie hero Tom
Mix. His mother, concerned about his learning, did not
approve. “He shouldn’t be filling his head with the like,”
Aunt Ann remembered her mother saying. Later in life,
Uncle Tom was still filling his head with an impressive
reading list that included James Joyce and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” He was born the
year Joyce’s “Dubliners” was published.
Along with others in his family in Cornaroya,
Uncle Tom spent time working at the nearby Convent of
Mercy. One of the older nuns there remembered him fondly
when Uncle Tom’s nephew Owen and his bride Lynn were
given a tour of the convent during a visit on their
honeymoon in 1993. The tour included the chapel, sacristy
and choir loft, where a huge organ was located. The nun
commented on how Uncle Tom would know all about how
the organ worked, including exactly how air was pumped
A 17-year-old Uncle Tom poses with his sisters Ann, left,
and Mary around 1931.
for the instrument to play. Earlier, Uncle Owen had shown
his visitors the stile (a step and opening through a stone
wall) next to his own home, across the boreen from the old
cottage, that he remembered Uncle Tom and Uncle Jim
taking when they would head to the convent.
It was somewhere near the family’s old house that
was the source of a fond memory for Uncle Tom that comes
via Patsy DeAscanis. Uncle Tom recalled his busy mother,
who needed a shortcut because she was leaving at the last
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