Article about Salthill in today's Irish Times

ErnieBert

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2011/0913/1224304019964.html#.Tm9hmZJmRP0.facebook

My glorious, garish, gaudy Salthill
HARRY McGEE
SUNDAY AFTERNOON on Salthill promenade and it’s being buffeted by the remains of Hurricane Katia sweeping in from the Atlantic. Sheets of rain wash across the choppy waters of Galway Bay. As a shower hits, we scurry into a shelter.

The prom is deserted save for a few figures hunching into the wind and a jogger struggling past. The beachfront kiosk advertising ice creams and coffees is shuttered (but, we later discover, not closed). This feels like Salthill in January. But it is September, the end of the summer. It’s a washout of a day in what locals say has been a washout of a season.

All the same, I’m happy to be here. This is one of Salthill’s many paradoxes. Even on a desolate day like this, the prom is still magical. Behind you, developers have come up with some appallingly tasteless wheezes on the so-called Golden Mile through the years. But once you turn your back on them what opens up is Galway Bay, the Clare hills, the Aran Islands on the horizon and the volatile ocean. This vista is immutable, magnificent, epic.

Salthill is an anomaly, a strange mixture of glorious and gaudy. On the one hand, it has evolved over half a century from an outlying village into a well-to-do suburb of Galway city. Hundreds of people walk the prom every day in all weathers.

In parallel, for 150 years it has been one of the country’s biggest seaside resorts. And you can’t have that without a certain element of neon, plastic and down-at-heel garishness.

I was born in Galway and raised in Salthill, so I experienced the gamut of its wholesome and not-so-wholesome attractions: an amazing GAA club, great golf and tennis clubs, long summer days spent swimming and diving in Blackrock . . . and then hanging around the arcades, dodgems and go-kart track at LeisureLand; going to gigs there and at Seapoint; watching some really nasty gang fights outside nightclubs in the late 1980s.

GalwayGaillimh

Good Article, he has a good insight into Salthill
I miss Del Rios was a great takeaway.

scholar007

GalwayDotCom wrote: »

Good Article, he has a good insight into Salthill
I miss Del Rios was a great takeaway.

The chips in Del Rios were lovely. The burgers in the Wimpy were nice too.

The young wans in Rumours were delicious

Zimmerframe

GalwayDotCom wrote: »

I miss Del Rios was a great takeaway.

The proverbial "those were the days", loved the grub in that place, but in hindsight I don't remember being in it while sober.

GalwayGaillimh

Jesus I miss the double decker burger they used to do in the Wimpy...
It was divine!

FlashD

Great article. Love Salthill. One of my favourites places, I always love to return to after my trips around the globe.

A brisk walk of the prom in the morning when there's not too many around, that fresh salty wind coming in off the bay, followed by a coffee and scone in one of the cafes.

A slice of heaven

brutes1

There was a shot of another article the author had written in the Tribune 20 yrs ago in the piece in the Times, does anyone have a link to it?

The main eyesores at present are the closed Baily point units and the former Kitty O sheas, would think they would do quite well commercially , albeit seasonally, but this stretch of Salthill needs to get back up and running again..does anyone know what the current position is with them,,,

antoobrien

I think the scene in The Guard where shot on the tower in Blackrock showed the contrast he talked about nicely. At first you think you it's somewhere out in Connemara because you can't see anything else, then with a different camera angle and you see a big apartment block in the Background.