Pádraic Ó Conaire
The seated figure in Eyre Square that every visitor photographs is a writer who was born in a pub on the docks a few hundred metres away. Pádraic Ó Conaire, born on 28 February 1882 and orphaned by the age of eleven, was sent to his uncle in Gairfean, Ros Muc, and came back fluent in Irish. In a life of 46 years he wrote 26 books, 473 stories, 237 essays and six plays, and his novel Deoraíocht, published in 1910, has been called the earliest modernist fiction in the language.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Donal Mac Coitir, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Padraic O'Conaire Statue, Eyre Square, Galway City Museum on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Docks, London, the road
His father was a publican with two premises in town and his mother was Kate McDonagh. He emigrated to London in 1899, worked for the Board of Education and threw himself into the Gaelic League; with Patrick Pearse he is counted one of the two most important writers of the Gaelic revival. His story M'asal Beag Dubh, My Little Black Donkey, lent its name in 2009 to Masal Bugduv, a fictional Moldovan footballer invented as a satire on transfer gossip, which several journalists reported as real.
The statue
Albert Power carved him in limestone and Éamon de Valera unveiled the statue in Eyre Square in 1935. It was a favourite with visitors until four men decapitated it in 1999; repaired at a cost of 50,000 pounds, it was moved into Galway City Museum in 2004, and a bronze replica took its place in the square in November 2017. Ó Conaire died on 6 October 1928. The model on this page pins the statue in the square and the museum where the original sits.
Questions people ask
Where is the Pádraic Ó Conaire statue?
Where was Pádraic Ó Conaire born?
What is Ó Conaire's most famous book?
Written from Wikipedia, "Pádraic Ó Conaire" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.