Both Chomhla · Co. Mayo
Brendan Shine wrote a song about the three pubs. There are two left.
Bohola sits at a crossroads in central Mayo, where the N5 between Castlebar and Swinford meets the Kiltimagh-to-Ballina road. It is a small place - a couple of hundred people, two pubs, a post office, a café, a church. The Irish name is Both Chomhla, meaning either the hut of a man called Chomhla or possibly a derivation of Both-Thola, the hut of St Tola, who founded a hermitage here on the River Gustien somewhere in the early medieval period. The village hasn't grown much since. The river is still there.
What the village does have is an extraordinary diaspora story. Martin Sheridan was born here on 28 March 1881, the son of a farming family. He emigrated to America at sixteen, joined the New York Police Department, and then - almost as a side project - became the greatest track-and-field athlete Ireland ever produced. Five gold medals, three silver, one bronze across three Olympic Games: St Louis in 1904, Athens in 1906, London in 1908. Discus, shot put, standing high jump, Greek discus. He died of Spanish flu on 27 March 1918, one day short of his thirty-seventh birthday. A memorial stands on the village green. It is not overblown. Neither was he.
The O'Dwyer family also came from this parish. William O'Dwyer was Mayor of New York from 1946 to 1950, then President Truman's Ambassador to Mexico. His brother Paul O'Dwyer was a civil liberties lawyer and President of the New York City Council. Their family donated land here for the Lismirrane Cheshire Home. Two brothers from a small Mayo village, between them shaping mid-century New York. Bohola has a habit of producing people who leave and then cast a long shadow back.
