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Family Fortunes: My father risked his life for a stricken goat in the Corrib

Bill Fahy loved to recall how he and a friend, both 16, saved a goat from a watery grave

Photograph: Thinkstock

Sheila Fahy
Thu Jul 30 2015 - 12:00

My father, Bill Fahy, loved to tell us four children of the time he jumped into the fast-flowing water of the river Corrib in Galway city in an effort to rescue a drowning goat. It was December 1930. He was proud of this and enjoyed the retelling of the details, pointing out that, in December, the water would not have been warm, laughing wholeheartedly as he remembered the daftness of it.

He and his friend Joe Tummon had gone to help a goat that had fallen into the Corrib, upriver of Galway city. They saw the plight of the goat and made their way from O’Brien’s Bridge and in to the flow of the river. They were both 16 years old. The goat was saved. To honour their gallant and humane conduct, my father and his friend were presented with a certificate by the Connaught Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; there was no doubting the facts of the story.

“Weren’t you the foolhardy eejit?” my mother would protest when the story was retold. It was her way of letting us – and more importantly him – know that she was not that easily impressed.

The certificate issued by the Connaught Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

Even as small children we knew that not everyone’s father could boast an act of heroism such as this. We knew this was special, even if we did not quite know where to place such a baffling event in our young minds. Had he really risked his life to save a goat? It crossed my mind at the time that my siblings and I would never have been born had he not been successful in that particular endeavour.

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In any case the framed certificate proudly hung on the wall of our house for 60-plus years until both our parents died in old age and our house was handed back to the Galway Artisans Dwellers Association, which had been our landlord since sometime in the 1940s. The certificate now hangs on the wall in my house, a reminder of happy days. I can almost hear the sound of laughter from my father and those early childhood days.

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