Over the last few years, there has been a steady and increasing change to the streetscape of Galway’s city centre. Former small and long-standing family businesses serving the people who live there have slowly and inexorably vanished. A bakery here. A fish shop there. A delicatessen too.
In their places have arrived the usual ubiquitous phone shops and vape shops now common to many Irish towns and cities. And to cater for the ever-growing numbers of international tourists who cannot get enough of Galway, there are more and more souvenir shops, and Aran jumper shops, most of them selling the same generic products and the same woolly sheep keyrings.
One Galway business that steadfastly endures, however, is Anthony Ryans Galway on Shop Street. This flagship department store has been in the same family since 1909, and now spans four generations. Extending over the decades, the premises now has no fewer than six different entrances; two on Shop Street, two on Middle Street, and two on Buttermilk Lane. (Their other Galway businesses include a Homestore shop on Lombard Street.)
I am talking to the current Anthony Ryan in his office up a higgledy-piggledy flight of stairs at the top of the building. The building itself, which spans over Buttermilk Lane, is a bit of a warren; a building that has clearly evolved over time and has retained its character. I notice a Dunnes Stores Christmas shopping bag on one shelf, and wonder if Ryan has been checking out the competition.
“This building we are sitting in now, in those days, was called Donnellans Hardware, a general merchants,” Ryan says. “My grandfather came to work in Donnellans at the turn of the last century. He was in the accounts office, and my grandmother Katherine was a milliner. She used to make all the hats. Edwardian times, kind of My Fair Lady stuff. I remember her. She was a fantastic seamstress.”
Ryan started working in the shop in 1981, alongside his father, having worked in Switzers for a period first.
I ask him what he considers makes a great retailer.
“Having a nose for fashion. Having great customer service and understanding customer needs,” he says.
Two sons work with him, Anthony and Joseph, who both started the same day just before the pandemic. Anthony jnr works in homewares, and Joseph in fashion. There are some 60 staff who work in the Shop Street shop alone. About 35 work full time, with students and other people, including nine over the age of 66, working part-time. Clearly, no age discrimination in this business.
Anthony Ryan and his son Joe at Anthony Ryans Department Store in Galway. Photo: Bryan O’Brien / The Irish Times
Anthony Ryans department store in Galway. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times 
Shop ledger shows account of a Mrs Barnacle (Nora Barnacle’s mother) who shopped in Anthony Ryans in Galway. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien / The Irish Times
“The high street in Galway has changed a lot in the last 15 to 20 years,” Joseph says. “It’s important that there is a good retail mix in the city centre. There are a lot of souvenir shops catering for tourists, and a lot of pubs and restaurants, and the nightlife and that side of it. But in terms of making Galway a retail destination, we need other businesses around us to give people a reason to come to Galway and shop.”
Why do they think they have survived selling clothes in a world where so many people now shop online?
“We do have a good online business too,” Ryan says. Some 15 per cent of their business is now conducted online. “But as to why are we still here? There are a couple of reasons. First, as a family business, we have managed succession. Succession of family businesses is often difficult in Ireland.”
I have to ask Ryan and Joseph Ryan if they have watched the HBO series, Succession, about the melodramatic familial power struggles within a huge media company.
Joseph laughs. “I did, but we are not like that.”
“The second reason we have survived is we have always held on to our customer service ethos,” Ryan says. “We have really worked hard on that. A lot of them are repeat customers. A lot of other places have lost the personal touch.”
Picture hanging in the store shows Paddy Ryan, then owner of Anthony Ryans, greeting US president John F Kennedy during his visit to Galway in June 1963. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times 
Anthony Ryan with staff in 1932. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times 
Anthony Ryans department store in Galway. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times
“We have a very loyal customer base,” Joseph says.
“We are very clear on where we are,” Ryan says. “We are not a top-end shop but we sell high-quality merchandise at affordable prices. People seem to appreciate that. We have a very strong following in the older demographic age group. The way their life is now, they don’t have mortgages, they have money to spend.”
It does seem true that the Ryans’ customer base skews older. Over the course of a weekday that I spend there, I see mostly women browsing the rails. They are almost all, it is accurate to say, women of an older age, who are most likely retired. The few men I see sit on the chairs that are scattered around the building, patiently waiting while their partners examine prices, look through the summer sale rails, and move with expertise through what are clearly familiar aisles. But then again, school is back, holidays are over, and anyone who is employed is presumably at some desk or workplace and not wandering around a clothes shop at noon.
Their quietest months of the year are February and September. It’s end of season now, so the bargain rails are advertising 70 per cent off. Among the people browsing today is Helen Hegarty.
“This is literally the only shop in Galway for my age group, and a lot of my friends say the same.” Hegarty has been a customer for over 40 years. A friend of hers bought a “lovely leather handbag and a wedding outfit” in the sale, although the particular item Hegarty herself is seeking out today seems to have already been sold.
Lorraine Doherty is a sales consultant for occasional wear. She has worked in the shop for more than three years. “The customers here are coming for years, and they are so loyal, including my own mother. We dress mothers of grooms, mothers of brides, people for weddings, race goers. There’s an awful lot of last-minute sales, especially around Race Week. Ladies come in sometimes all dressed up, and with their make up done, looking for fascinators on the way to the races.”
Lorraine Doherty at work in the ladies’ fashion department. Photo: Bryan O’Brien / The Irish Times 
The ladies’ fashion department in Anthony Ryans. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times 
Alina Ferrie at work in the lingerie section of Anthony Ryans department store in Galway. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times
Are fascinators still in fashion? “They have not gone out of fashion in Galway,” as Doherty observes.
John Conran is a buyer in men’s wear, and has worked in the shop for 17 years. “We sell everything and that’s our point of difference,” he says. “We carry all the sizes and lengths. We’re a department store. We’re not Brown Thomas and we don’t want to be Brown Thomas. Ryans is the Clerys clock of Galway.”
Browsing on the second floor is Anne Byrne. She is looking for a pink shirt for a pink-themed sports event the following day. “I would regularly come in. So many other outlets in Galway have become shops that cater for tourists, or are vape shops or nail bars.” The tourist shops sell clothes, she says, but those clothes are souvenir-themed jumpers and T-shirts and sweatshirts. “Clothes here are always good quality.”
“I see the open door at Anthony Ryans and I come in,” says Sandra O’Driscoll. She’s visiting Galway from Tipperary, along with her friend Mary Costello, who used to live and work in Galway.
“I always loved Anthony Ryans,” Costello says. “It’s the variety of the brands and the quality of the clothes.” When the friends visit the shop on holiday, they look for investment pieces; coats, and handbags in particular.
John Conran at work in the suit department of Anthony Ryans. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times 
Sisters and customers Leslie White and Paula Dodd shopping in Anthony Ryans department store in Galway. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien/The Irish Times
What keeps bringing them back?
“The service,” Costello says. “Everyone has time for you.”
I ask Anthony Ryan if he spends much time on the floor himself, mingling with customers.
“Not enough,” he says. “I used to be a retailer. I used to be downstairs serving customers. Now administration is huge in running a business. It’s very hard to be on the shop floor. One of the problems with a family business, and our employees will tell us this, that people come in here looking for a deal. They say, ‘I’m a friend of Anthony’s’, or, ‘I know Anthony.’ I keep telling the staff I must have thousands and thousands of friends! I wouldn’t have a clue who most of them are. Maybe I met them somewhere sometime. But Galway is a small place.”
Do any of these so-called friends ever get the deals they are chancing their collective arms for?
“Sometimes. We will always try to do something for them, even if just a little bit. That is the family business touch.”
The question has to be asked. The family own very valuable real estate in the centre of the city. Have they ever considered selling up?
“No,” Ryan says. “What we have considered is expanding the business in other locations; not selling up. We are not selling.”
Later that day, I meet a friend for coffee who lives in Galway, and mention where I have been earlier. She tells me right away that she buys all her lingerie in the sale from Anthony Ryan. “They have great bargains.” In all the years I have known this friend, I have never once before heard her mention shopping in Ryans, but it appears she is also one of their many loyal customers.