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.
Just over two decades ago, also in September, as it happens, I wrote a long article for the Connacht Tribune. It was headlined, dramatically, "The strangulation of Salthill" and was what's billed in the newspaper business as a "jaundiced view". The piece accepted all the realities that went with its being a tourist resort but argued that Salthill had lost its way "because of short-sighted planning and the lure of the jingle of the cash till".
My thesis was that Salthill had failed to adapt to societal changes since the 1960s. Cheaper flights and sun holidays had eroded the Irish family holiday market. There was no long-term strategy.
Left to its own devices, Salthill during the 1970s went for a younger clientele – its first disco was the pun-tastic Sanfrandisco – who stayed for shorter durations or even just for the day. This led to a glut of nightclubs and pubs and a tailspin downmarket.
There was little rejuvenation (with the exception of LeisureLand, which never lived up to expectations), and Salthill became shabby, even though there were some nice hotels and restaurants.
In the late 1980s Galway city became a big tourist attraction, with a vibrant arts and music scene. Hotels, hostels, trendy pubs, cafes and restaurants sprang up. Salthill was attractive only on glorious summer days and, for its clubs, at night.
The local historian Tom Kenny recalls its degeneration. “It changed from a family place and started focusing on a ‘lager crowd’. It became very rough. Salthill suffered for that policy in the long term. All the nightclubs eventually migrated into the city. But that’s not altogether a bad thing,” he says.
A planner I quoted described Salthill as slightly shabby and rundown. “A person thinking of opening any type of decent restaurant would not contemplate going to Salthill. They’d go straight to the city centre,” he said.
TWO DECADES LATER, how much has changed? I have re-explored Salthill recently, revisiting the haunts of my youth and speaking again to Kenny, of Kenny's Bookshop and Art Galleries.
Some major changes have occurred. The main drag once had a string of small hotels, 20 or more. Virtually all have disappeared: the Sacre Coeur, the Banba, the Grand, the Warwick, the Atlantic Bay View. Now there are only two big hotels: the Galway Bay and the Salthill, both modern, both overlooking the prom.
In the late 1950s, land was reclaimed from the sea, to extend the promenade so it would link Salthill with the city. By the 1990s some of it, at the back of the main street, was unsightly waste ground. That has all been cleaned up, and a tourist office and an aquarium have been built there. When the latter was being constructed a local wag asked, “What are they going to put into it? Mackerel?” For, every autumn outside the aquarium, people stand on the rocks, fishing for the mackerel that shoal into shore.
For Kenny, the main change is that Salthill has become a fully-fledged suburb. He points to dentists’ surgeries, solicitors’ offices, good restaurants, a Slavic pub (where once stood a pub-nightclub, with mock battlements, called the Castle), trendy coffee shops, a microbrewery and a gastropub. There is also the upmarket Mortons supermarket and a gourmet tart company.
There is no doubt that Salthill has shaken off the indolence and fast-buck thinking of 1991. In recent years it has started to attract big events like currach racing, in the form of An Tóstal (which returned after a gap of over 40 years), and, in recent weeks, the Ironman triathlon, with 2,000 participants.
Kenny talks about a committed core of people who care deeply about the resort – and, among other things, have produced an energetic and slick website, ilovesalthill.com.
Not everything has budged. The amusement arcades remain, including Claudes, which has been there forever. They are still full of sad-looking middle-aged people feeding slot machines. The only real change is that there is no longer a permanent pall of cigarette smoke.
Kenny says it was always thus. “I was reading recently of residents in Dalysfort Road complaining about amusements in Salthill Park in 1902. They’ve always been there and are in the nature of a place like that. They are the distraction for rainy days.”
Nor did the resort escape the excesses of the boom. Two hotels were demolished to make way for a huge development called Baily Point. This overdecorated wedding cake was never finished; it’s now a mammoth boarded-up eye-sore. Another iconic building is the Eglinton Hotel, which was built in the 19th century. Anthony Eden and Douglas Hyde stayed there when visiting the west of Ireland. Now it is a hostel for asylum seekers.
LeisureLand is still there, still struggling to define itself: it has an underused hall, a successful swimming pool and gym, and a summer fairground.
Two decades ago, the council’s big plan was to revamp LeisureLand, to make it a “mega leisure centre”, with multiple cinemas, bowling and amusements. Had it worked, it could have forced Salthill upmarket.
Yet, somehow, almost by osmosis, Salthill learned from its mistakes and renewed itself. I was probably a little too harsh two decade ago, didn’t take account of the ridiculously short season and the havoc that bad weather can cause businesses.
The travel writer Eric Newby could not help but notice the pervasive newly built bungalows when cycling through Ireland 30 years ago. But he also made the acute observation that, despite the sins against taste, people were generally happy living in them. Salthill is never going to be quaint. But it has mellowed. People no longer talk about its being ruined or overrun. It has found a balance between its beauty and its beast over the past two decades And it is all the better for it.
For more on Salthill, see the Galway magazine published with The Irish Timeson Thursday
