The history of Spiddal
The leper hospital, the Famine harbour, the orphanage, the 1904 church, the Waterboys. 7 moments, in order.
- Middle Ages
The hospital
An Spidéal comes from ospidéal, from the Anglo-Norman ospitel: a leper hospital stood in West Spiddal. Other hospitals followed over the centuries, among them a famine hospital in the 1840s.
- 1776
The old chapel
The ruin of a chapel of 1776 stands near the later church.
- 1840s
Famine
Evictions and starvation hit the village hard; after appeals by the parish priest John O'Grady and A. W. Blake, the Board of Works set men to improving the harbour.
- 1848 to 1850s
The Bird's Nest
The Irish Church Missions opened the Connemara Orphans' Nursery, for up to ninety children, linked to the Smyly Homes in Dublin. When it closed as an orphanage the Sisters of Mercy ran a girls' secondary school in it.
- 1904
Cill Éinde
The Catholic church of St Enda was built.
- 1980s
Fisherman's Blues
The Waterboys recorded part of the album in Spiddal and later a song called Spring Comes to Spiddal; the television series Ros na Rún is filmed here for TG4.
- 2022
The Irish-speaking village
About 75 per cent of people speak Irish and some 40 per cent of those every day outside school, in a village west of Galway on the R336.
Where this comes from
Every paragraph above summarises a statement in Wikipedia, "Spiddal", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as it read on 2026-09-19. Follow it for the footnotes. Nothing has been added from memory.