The Browne Doorway: A gateway to freedom for slaves, to wealth for slave-owners.

Situated by the flagpoles on Eyre Square bearing the flags of the fourteen Tribes of Galway, the forlorn and lonely looking Browne doorway didn’t always live here! No indeed, this impressive, richly-carved doorway once graced the grand mansion of the Brownes, a powerful merchant family, one of the fourteen ‘tribes’ or merchant families of Galway. They thrived here in the city, on Abbeygate Street, for four hundred years until the city was destroyed in the fateful, ten month-long siege of Galway, the last battle of the eleven year-long English Civil War. The Browne family, like the other thirteen merchant families of Galway, rightfully fled the city after the siege of 1652, , spreading out across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Tasmania, mostly continuing their profession of merchant trading. One of the Browne family, Howe Peter Browne, the 2nd Marquess of Sligo 1788-1845, was appointed as governor of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands in 1836. Himself a slave owner, he was tasked by the British Government with the abolition of slavery in the islands of the Caribbean by the British government. An unlikely emancipation hero, he succeeded masterfully, despite the odds, and freed the slaves, paid off the slave owners, and ironically, years later, returned to his vast estates, and huge mansion, today known as Westport House in county Mayo, only to continue a form of slavery, an unfair landlord-tenant relationship on his own estates until the Republic of Ireland was established in 1921. The remnants of the Browne Doorway that we see here today in Eyre Square is hardly haunted, yet we cannot pass it by today without remembering the millions of slaves Howe Peter Browne emancipated, and the thousands of tenant farmers on his own estates in Ireland who fared not much better than slaves.