Máirtín Mór – the man who made Galway

I’m not sure I like him, but I certainly admire him. He had a real sense of civic duty. A lot of what he did benefited the company, but a lot benefited Galway, too. He always saw the bigger picture and you don’t see many people like him.”

That’s the verdict of biographer Jackie Uí Chionna on Máirtín Mór McDonogh, a colourful character who built Thomas McDonogh & Sons, the business started by his father in the 1860s into one of Ireland’s most influential companies.

At its height in Galway, Thomas McDonagh & Sons employed 700 people, making it the biggest employer in the West of Ireland in a time of great poverty, when Ireland had very few successful businesses and no multi-nationals.

“Guinness would have been the only comparison,” says Jackie. Under Máirtín’s direction, the McDonoghs portfolio included everything from a fertilizer factory to farms, a saw mills, electricity, coal to cloth. And they harnessed electricity from the Corrib to power their many factories.

“Half of Galway was employed by them and the other half looked on in envy,” was a catchphrase at the time.

In addition, Máirtín, the second son in a family of six surviving children, was involved in all aspects of Galway’s civic and sporting life for more than 50 years until his death, aged 74, in 1934.  His friends described him as ‘impatient’ and ‘brusque’, while to his enemies, he was ‘terrifying’.

But, so great was his influence that one obituary, in the Connacht Sentinel, stated that ‘for half a century he was Galway’.

That’s the phrase that gave Jackie the title of her book, ‘He Was Galway’ – Máirtín Mór McDonogh 1860-1934, which was commissioned by the current owners of McDonogh’s, Thomas and his son Tom.

Máirtín’s nephew and grand-nephew approached Jackie, through NUIG, where the PhD graduate lectures in history, to commission this biography. They’d previously commissioned local historian Peadar O’Dowd to write an account of the company, which was published as ‘In from the West’.

These days, the McDonogh property portfolio spans the globe and includes Avenue de Beaulieu, 22-24, 1160 Brussels, which houses the European Commission offices.

It’s a far cry from the cottage in Gorumna, South Connemara, where Máirtín Mór was born to Thomas McDonogh and Honoria Hernon, from an influential, but unpopular, family on Inis Mór. The couple moved to Galway in the early 1860s when Thomas began working with his brother’s in-laws’ business and rose swiftly until he owned it. Meanwhile, Honoria, an astute businesswoman, started her own shop near the docks, supplying Aran people.

Máirtín, who spent time studying at UCG, joined the business in 1879 at 19, developing it with extraordinary foresight and drive. He never drank and never married.

“Máirtín Mór didn’t have a family of his own, so Galway becomes his responsibility,” says Jackie. “He cares for it in a way that any responsible parent of that time would have, and in that way, he disciplines people when he feels they need it.”

Violently anti-trade union, Máirtín was renowned for conflicts with workers’ groups, but during a famous strike in 1913 he secretly distributed money to workers’ wives and children, via local clergy. Such a gesture captured his “complex nature”, according to Jackie. Similarly, he never played golf and never swam but he became chairman of the golf club and the swimming club. And it was Máirtín, a racing enthusiast and Chairman of the Galway Races, who ensured Ballybrit Racecourse was put in trust for Galway.

Jackie ran into several obstacles when it came to researching the book. Firstly, Máirtín had left no personal archive of correspondence – despite being a Cumann na nGaedheal TD from 1927 until his death. In addition, many of the McDonogh archives had been destroyed in a fire. That “didn’t help”, she says – an understatement for sure.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.