The Galway City Saturday Market

It is likely that the Saturday morning Galway market, arranged in a wrap of streets around the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas, smack in the centre of the city, may well come to be regarded as the most significant statement on behalf of good food in Ireland.

For a start, it was created by the people who come here to sell, and supported by the people who come here to shop, and both these groups have persevered and prospered despite the attempts of officialdom to make their lives as awkward as possible.

The success of the venture, with local people buying local foods from local producers, has been both prototype and archetype for the markets that have followed throughout Ireland, all of them in some way or other imitative of what happens here every Saturday morning.

The Galway market broke the mould of genteel country markets and created an institution where organic foods were given as a base line, where hand-made methods were the very thing that attracted the punters, and where true craic and bonhommie offered a vital alternative to the sterility of a supermarket shopping experience.

For these reasons, the Galway producers broke the mould, and today Cait Curran, Dirk Flaake, Willem den Heyer, the Sheridan brothers, Moyglass Bakery, Brekish Dairy and all the others who turn up to trade here every week offer one of the icon experiences of Ireland.