Connaught Rangers Barracks: The Boy by the River

Here beside the Corrib once stood the Shambles Barracks, home to the Connaught Rangers. It was a noisy, rough place bordered by the city abattoir upstream. Blood and offal poured into the river, turning the water foul. Soldiers were forbidden to drink from it. One recruit, a sixteen-year-old boy from Connemara, did not know the rule. Exhausted from training, he knelt by the bank, cupped his hands, and drank. He was dead within a day. They buried him quietly near the small waterfall behind the barracks, the old latrine where waste met the current. Long after the army left, fishermen told of seeing a boy in uniform standing at the rail at dawn, helmet under his arm, staring into the water that killed him. When they looked again he was gone, though his reflection sometimes stayed a moment longer. The sound of dripping water and the scent of metal still hang here, reminders of a young life swallowed by the river.