Isn’t he on the dole now too
I suppose he is. He’s really fucked himself up, he’s going to need some network of family and friends to help through a very difficult time. His G A meetings will help him. I wish him all the best, that gambling is truly a curse.
He should speak to Fergus, he’s after changing his life around
I don’t know who Fergus is but maybe he can help him, he’s going to need it.
I’m sure Niall McNamee is all over this
One for the townies.
In her hey-day she was a renowned beauty and socialite who would host fabulous tennis parties in the family home courtyard behind William Street, enjoy afternoon tea in the Great Southern Hotel and Sunday drives in her father’s open top car.
By the end of her life, Una Taaffe had been made a ward of court.
For the five years after her brother Eddie’s death in 2001, she had been living alone and terribly frugally, in badly deteriorated living quarters above the closed shop with no sanitation, too proud to accept help.
She lived the last two years of her life in the Coral Haven Nursing Home on the Headford Road. When she died on September 24, 2006 she had more than €8 million in her bank accounts, much of it from the proceeds of selling the knitwear shop which Americans flocked to for years despite the horrid smell from the dozens of stray dogs and cats which took up residence inside.
Today, the prime located shop, bought at the height of the boom by businessman Gerry Barrett for an estimated €20 million, remains derelict.
But its link with its late owner remains ever strong for generations of Galwegians. Una Taaffe was one of the great characters of Galway, known far and wide as the city’s Miss Havisham, an eccentric who would don dark clothes and bright red lipstick, followed everywhere she went by animals.
Her shop also attracted many homeless people, one of whom she married in the 1980s. Her husband died some years later in an abandoned car fire near the Spanish Arch.
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Thanks for sharing. Just goes to show that you can live a contented life without money.
I’m not sure that “contented” would describe her. She was a small feature of the childhood of every city based galwegian.
She was an eccentric type character I take it then. Lord have mercy on her.
That she was. You’d see her about whenever you went uptown. Her shop was a smell to behold. Truly eye-watering. The yanks loved it.
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Hardly… I like a bet but I’d never get myself in that kind of bother. He must have been shit at gambling to lose that much that quickly
And Bressie - he might have depression and self loathing as well as the gambling addiction
Fergus McCarron
The smell off that place when you’d pass by. Dogs I think it was…
Duine le Dia ab ea í…
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300k over 5 and a half months is some going by Hehir. How did he do that? Plus if he won 5 grand alarm bells would go off with the bookies, but hundreds of grand going through his bank account and into betting accounts and no questions asked.
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Bookies are scum. As bad as the tobacco industry.
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Citybin could do with reconciling their books more regularly too
They must be doing serious trade to not notice that gone
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The wheelie bin trade is a scam. As bad as the bookmaker industry
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