Charles Stewart Parnell spoke from its balcony, as did Michael Davitt in the turbulent days of the Land League.
After more than a century in existence, Ballina's famous Moy Hotel is no more, but the building in the town centre is taking on a new life. Extensive renovations are ongoing, and when complete, the old Moy will house the Ballina branch library and an all-new Co Mayo Museum.
The curator of the new museum is Dr Susan Mannion, formerly of Craigavon Museum in Co Armagh. She is soon to begin negotiations with the National Museum for Ballina's acquisition of Mayo-related archaeological artefacts. With the library due to move in first, the project will be opened in stages, and after the opening of a temporary gallery which Dr Mannion says will tell "different storylines", the main museum "will eventually tell the permanent story of Mayo".
Part of that saga will be the story of the Moy Hotel itself. For many people growing up in Ballina, the hotel was as much a part of the town as the river from which it took its name.
The history of the Moy Hotel goes back to the Melvins of Ballina and the Rourke family of Co Meath. Martin Melvin negotiated a 35-year lease from Brig-Gen Oliver Paget Bourke - a private secretary to Queen Victoria - for what was originally the Bourke town house, and established the hotel in the 1870s. Martin's son-in-law John later ran the hotel until his sudden death of rheumatic fever in 1884, when he was just 38.
The hotel lease eventually passed to Joseph and Bertha McMonagle, who already owned the Imperial Hotel in the town. As a young woman, Bertha had emigrated to Chicago, where she worked in the famous Daly's Hotel, a haunt of Al Capone. By all accounts she cut a striking figure in Ballina, the word in the town being that "she looked like Queen Victoria, dressed like Queen Victoria and thought she was Queen Victoria".
Eventually Megan McMonagle did a deal with her grandfather and bought the hotel along with her husband Tommy Cooke.
Megan McMonagle had a degree in music from London while Tommy Cooke, a Dubliner, was an Army captain in Athlone. After they married, Tommy and Megan became synonymous with the Moy Hotel for over 40 years, from 1953 to 1996.
The Moy prospered and became a great town meeting-place. In the heyday of the Ballina Rugby Club, long before it got its own premises, the hotel was the unofficial clubhouse - that is to say, the team showered there as well as drinking there. The Moy was also popular with bankers and business people, while local Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael meetings were often held on the same nights in different rooms. As for the Moy's legendary nightlife, local Ballina councillor Frances McAndrew says: "It was in effect the only nightclub in town - the Lillie's Bordello of its day". The young were catered for too, and many who grew up in Ballina in the 1960s will recall the cavernous room at the back of the hotel, the scene of numerous Saturday-night "hops".
There was always something going on in the Moy. Thus an ICA meeting would get its agenda over and done with and retire to the great mahogany bar, where its members might well meet up with a rugby crowd, a teachers' union delegation and maybe a group of fishermen from England or Germany, there to pursue the prized Moy salmon.
In latter years business began to fail but the bar ticked along. Towards the end there was no beer on tap, and one was never sure what brand of bottled beer might be in stock, but there was always liquor. Asking for ice was thought to be in poor taste for the good reason that it was not available. Nevertheless, a lively poker school endured in the hotel almost to its last days. Megan would play, and Tommy would serve the drinks.
Megan also welcomed and catered for Traveller weddings when just about no other hotel would. Her only rule in this regard was that no liquor was to be served: the children would bring their own "minerals", the adults would drink beer and at the end of the night the Traveller women would pay the bill - in cash.
Megan was also active for years in the St Vincent de Paul Society and was famed for going out on St Stephen's Day with a gang of pals, all suitably attired in outrageous costumes, collecting for "the Wran" (in Ballina parlance), and regularly making large hauls for charity.
Tommy and Megan raised eight children, all surviving, under sometimes difficult conditions in the hotel. They ran the Moy with their own easygoing style from 1953 until it was sold in the summer of 1996, as reported in The Irish Times. Tommy died later that same year and Megan passed on three years later, but their spirit lives on in the town.
Some 12 years ago an old visitors' book turned up, showing that among the Moy's illustrious guests over the years were W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and Douglas Hyde. The book was given to Trinity College and might well be an appropriate volume for the new Mayo museum.
Other volumes will be needed to tell the full story of the Moy Hotel for all those for whom it will always be a part of old Ballina.