Galway (Irish: Gaillimh) is a barony in Ireland, comprising the city of Galway and parts of the surrounding county of Galway. It is coterminous with the former County of the Town of Galway, a county corporate created by the town's 1610 charter and abolished by the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898.
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Boundary
The town's 1672 charter defined the corporate county's extent as the municipal borough of Galway and its "liberties" for two miles around. About 1770 the county bounds were extended, and in 1871 the census gave its area as 22,483 acres (9,099 ha). The 1846 Parliamentary Gazetteer describes its bounds as roughly a semicircle with a radius of 4 miles (6.4 km) centred on Galway town, with Galway Bay to the south, from Forramoyle in the west, through Lough Inch to the southern shore of Lough Corrib in the north, then southeast to the north of Killeen, and down to the bay 1 1⁄2 miles east of Merlin Park.
Galway town became a county borough in 1985, and a city under the Local Government Act 2001. Its administrative area of 5,000 hectares (12,360 acres) is less than that of the barony.
Divisions
The barony contains 111 townlands. These are in three civil parishes: all of the parish of St Nicholas, covering the centre city; most of Rahoon, to the west; and about half of Oranmore, to the east.
Government
Whereas Galway Corporation governed the borough, a separate grand jury had a parallel authority over the whole county of the town. The Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840 abolished the borough and its corporation, but not the county and its grand jury. The town commissioners who governed the town after the Corporation's abolition petitioned in 1878 to have the town boundary extended to the limits of the county of the town. This did not happen.