An Oral History of University College Galway, 1930–80 A University in Living Memory

“The University in Living Memory” was an oral history project initiated by NUIG in 2007 to establish what it was like to study, teach, and work at what was formerly University College Galway from 1930 to 1980. Interviews were conducted with everyone from college presidents to grounds staff, from students who began their college lives in the 1930s to the post-free-education student activists of the 1970s. There are tales of lady superintendents supervising the moral well-being of female students; of dodgy digs and batty landladies; of eccentric professors and maternal tea ladies. There are scholarship students coming to Galway with a single change of clothes and very little else except a keen desire for knowledge, de-mobbed American GIs coming to study medicine in the 1950s and creating quite an impression on the female population, army cadets, nuns, and brothers who made up quite distinct strands of the student population, and generations of ordinary students from every part of the country and socio-economic background who came to UCG for a good education––and to have some fun in the process. This book tells the story of a university that changed considerably over time, but retains the affection of those who have been associated with it over many decades.

Jackie Ui Chionna teaches history at National University of Ireland, Galway. Her biography of Galway businessman and politician Martin “Mairtin Mor” McDonogh, He was Galway, was published by Four Courts Press in 2016. She is writing a biography of music scholar and code breaker Emily Anderson OBE.