Once upon a time, the Warwick Hotel, the Oasis nightclub and the Corrib Great Southern Hotel were pillars of hospitality in Galway, but since the mid-noughties, each has gone from dereliction to being bulldozed away.
In Salthill, the joke goes that by the time a proposed nursing home is developed from the wreckage of the Warwick and the Oasis, the old clientele will be ready to return to their former haunts.
In the 1980s and 90s, the venues sat side by side and were home to some of the best music nights in Galway. The Warwick played host to the likes of Sinéad O’Connor, Coldplay, New Order, Tom Tom Club and The Pogues, while the Oasis was, alongside the Warwick, part of a slew of popular Salthill nightclubs that have long since disappeared.
Leo Moran, founding member of The Saw Doctors, recalls the band playing their first gig outside of Tuam in the Warwick – a support slot for The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Many associate the place with former owner and DJ Doc (Dermot O’Connor), but Moran also credits promoters Padraig Boran and Tony Kelly for bringing established acts to the city.
“You have to think life goes on and we can’t always be living in the past, but it is sad to see itself and the Oasis cleared,” he says. “Very strange. There was so much fun had there. It was an odd thing at the time that you had to go to Salthill after the pub – there was nowhere else to go. So that was just what we got used to doing.”
The sites that housed the Warwick and the Oasis – which have been lying bare and idle for some time – were acquired by property development group Bartra earlier this year, who submitted a fresh planning application for a 154-bedroom nursing home. Planning permission for a smaller project, a 60-bedroom nursing home on the site of the Warwick, had previously been granted in 2019 but any development failed to materialise.
On the other side of town, The Corrib Great Southern Hotel which hosted many weddings and other functions, closed its doors on the Dublin Road in 2007 and was long earmarked for a student accommodation development given its proximity to Atlantic Technological University. Its demolition got under way in 2021, six years after it was added to the derelict sites register.
The site is co-owned by Trigo Property Group, a part of the Comer Property Group, and the McHale Group’s Welcorrib Ltd. Last year, Trigo said redevelopment of the site was on hold until Galway City Council finalised their retail strategy. The council is yet to complete its strategy, though they began conducting surveys on the topic in October.
Another sticking point is the Residential Zoned Land Tax (RZLT). Trigo argue their site should not be included on mapping for the RZLT, which aims to incentivise faster development projects on land that has been zoned for residential use.
Bartra Property Group were unable to comment while their planning application in Salthill remains ongoing and the Comer Group did not respond when asked for an update on the site of the former Corrib Great Southern.
Paul Fahy, director of Galway International Arts Festival, gave David Gray his first gig in Galway in The Warwick. It was before White Ladder, when few people had really heard of the singer-songwriter.
“If memory serves me correctly, I think we had 95 people go to it,” he says. “It was my first entry into losing money.”
Mr Fahy recalls curated gigs in the Oasis and other nightclubs around Salthill as gateways to new music genres for attendees at the time. He hopes the right redevelopment appears soon on the sites.
“Both the Oasis and the Warwick, being side by side, make for a very large site for whatever will go there in Salthill.
“Also, where the Corrib Great Southern Hotel is, it’s such a highly visible site that’s passed by thousands of cars every single day and people on buses as they commute into the city for work. It was an eyesore for a long time and it’s a very significant site. It’d be great to see those places thoughtfully developed.”
The Saw Doctors’ debut album, 1991′s If This is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back, famously features the band members’ fathers on its cover, wearing leather jackets on the stage of the Warwick.
“We did a photo shoot,” Moran says. “We told them to dress up as rock stars. We went down to the airport, and we took pictures of them on the planes and getting up and down the stairwell on to the plane.
“Then we went into the Great Southern (now the Hardiman Hotel on Eyre Square) and we’d a load of women mobbing them . . . They were kind of tired at that stage, so we said we’d better take a break. We had a bit of lunch and a couple of pints.
“We said there’s only one more now – we’re going off to the Warwick. You could see them like Jesus Christ, is this ever going to be over? But that’s the one that worked. What a brilliant stage it was.”
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