Inside Galway’s oldest department store: ‘We’re not Brown Thomas and we don’t want to be’

O ver the last few years, there has been a steady and increasing change to the streetscape of Galway ’s city centre. Former small and long-standing family businesses serving the people who live there have slowly and inexorably vanished. A bakery here. A fish shop there. A delicatessen too.

In their places have arrived the usual ubiquitous phone shops and vape shops now common to many Irish towns and cities. And to cater for the ever-growing numbers of international tourists who cannot get enough of Galway, there are more and more souvenir shops, and Aran jumper shops, most of them selling the same generic products and the same woolly sheep keyrings.