The Town Hall Theatre (Irish: Amharclann Halla na Cathrach)[1] is a theatre in Galway, Ireland. It was commissioned as a courthouse and later accommodated the meeting place and offices of Galway Corporation.
History
The building was commissioned as the courthouse for the town of Galway (the county courthouse being located opposite, across courthouse square, and still being used as Galway city and county courthouse to this day).[2]
It was designed by Alexander Hay in the neoclassical style, built in ashlar stone and was completed in 1825. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage of five bays facing onto Courthouse Square, with the end bays slightly projected forward. The central section of three bays featured a tetrastyle portico formed by Doric order columns supporting an entablature. The end bays were fenestrated by segmental headed windows with voussoirs.[3]
The building was later used as a town hall by Galway Corporation. The corporation was dissolved under the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840, with the town commissioners as its successor. After it was reformed in 1937, Galway Corporation was mostly based at offices in Dominick Street and Fishmarket.[4]
In the 1950s, the building was converted into a cinema and was used for film screenings until it fell into disrepair in the 1990s. Galway Corporation (renamed Galway City Council in 2001), with the assistance of a grant from the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, undertook a major refurbishment of the building between 1993 and 1995 and it reopened as a municipal theatre in October 1995.[5][6][7]
The venue attracts audiences in excess of 100,000 annually (close to 2 million since being officially re-opened on 1 February 1996) making it the most successful theatre of its size in Ireland.[8]
It is used as a venue for several festivals annually including Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which is held in April each year,[9][10] and the Galway International Arts Festival, which is held in July each year.[11][12]
Charlie Byrne's hosts a pop-up bookshop there in April each year during Cúirt.[13]
