Galway and Ennis Grand Junction Railway Petitioners, 1845
A railway line, eventually projected to connect the city of Galway, with counties Waterford and Wexford in the south-east of Ireland, was proposed in 1845, a time of great railway expansion in Britain and Ireland. The prospectus for the proposed railway line read in part:
“This important Line of Railway will connect Galway, the capital of the West, the most rising commercial town in Ireland, and the future Atlantic Steam Packet Station for the departure of all mails, goods, and passengers for the Canadas, West Indies, the United States and Mexico, with the Cork and Limerick, and Waterford and Limerick Railways, by the Limerick, Ennis and Killaloe Line; thereby completing a direct and uninterrupted communication with the South, and securing to Galway, by those Lines, all the traffic intended for export from the South of England and Ireland to the New World.”
The proposed railway was supported by petitions in both Galway and Clare. The signatories to the Clare petition signed the following declaration:
Declaration of the Town of Ennis in favour of the Galway and Ennis Grand Junction Railway (via Gort and Oranmore).
“We the Clergymen, Magistrates, Merchants, Town Commissioners, and other Inhabitants of Ennis, highly approving of the Railway for connecting this Town with Galway, by the Galway and Ennis Grand Junction Railway, and feeling it to be a line of very great value, as relates to the trade and commerce between Ennis and Galway, commend it to the warmest and strongest support of the Inhabitants of Ennis and of the County at Large, as well as to those Towns and districts through which it is intended to pass.”
The petition was signed in Ennis on the 22nd and the 26th November 1845, and the petitioners’ names were duly published in the Clare Journal in the editions of Monday 1st December, Monday 8th December and Monday 15th December. The petitioners’ names from Clare are given here.