Galway’s new Salmon Weir pedestrian and cycle crossing is to be named “Hope Bridge”.
The decision has been criticised by a campaign supported by several historians and writers to have it named after a forgotten Cumann na mBan leader Julia Morrissey.
The campaign says the chosen name is “bland” and “meaningless” with “no connection to Galway”.
“This is a politically-motivated decision - the city council had no intention of naming the bridge after a republican woman! In doing so, they are burying Julia Morrissey's memory all over again,” the campaign says.
After the group made the proposal two years ago, Galway City Council wrote a new civic commemoration policy, which included a public consultation process
Other names suggested included that of late Galway historian, Peadar O’Dowd.
Morrissey, who was from Athenry in Co Galway, helped found Cumann na mBan in 1914, and took command of 50 Cumann na mBan volunteers in Galway under the overall leadership of her close friend and comrade, Liam Mellows, in 1916.
She remained active until Mellows’ execution by Free State forces in December 1922 – a death which had a profound impact on her.
By the early 1930s, she had been committed to the ‘mental asylum’ in Ballinasloe.
Historian Conor McNamara noted in a recent book that Morrissey never recovered from the shock of Mellows’s execution. The Military Service Pension Board posted forms out to her on three occasions while she was in St Brigid’s hospital in Ballinasloe, but she received no stipend because they were not returned correctly.
Over 40 years after her burial in Athenry in 1974, an inscription was placed on her grave by a group named Relatives and Friends of Galway 1916.
Just 24 metres south of the existing Salmon Weir bridge, “Hope Bridge” is the first new crossing over the river Corrib in the city in 30 years.