The River of Salmon
They called it Abhainn na mBrádán - the River of Salmon — and built it on the banks of the Corrib, as if naming alone could summon prosperity upstream. The cranes sang, the bankers toasted, and everyone knew this was the new Ireland - glass, limestone, and limitless credit.
The builder was local, charming, and blessed with a line of credit long enough to reach heaven. The bank was Anglo Irish, the church of the age. Paper promises poured into foundations until belief itself set like concrete - optimism and overdrafts hardened together.
We named our buildings like blessings: River of Salmon, City of Light, Island of Ireland. We thought if the names were holy enough, the rents would follow. They didn’t.
Then came the ebb. The salmon kept swimming, but the money fled - first to London, then to NAMA, and finally to unseen landlords, guardians of the glass temple, waiting for a market that never returns.
Today, only a charity shop endures, selling the remnants of optimism by the kilo. Above it, empty windows stare across to the courthouse - fittingly, the last building in Galway still full of activity.
The locals whisper that the developer died for his sins, or from a broken heart, or just from accounting. It doesn’t matter. Every city needs a myth to explain its unfinished buildings.
Ireland’s greatest foma was that it had finally outgrown itself. For a brief, shimmering moment, even the sandbanks of Dubai held a miniature Island of Ireland - a nation so intoxicated by belief it tried to colonise an archipelago of illusions.
Now the tide has gone out again, revealing what was always there: an island that mistakes the reflection of its ambition for the thing itself.