Yesterday, I posted photos of the television version of Jack Taylor from the upcoming Magma production of THE GUARDS. THE GUARDS is based on the Ken Bruen novel of the same name.

Today, we have some pictures of the world of Jack Taylor: Nimmo’s Pier and The Claddagh. The Claddagh is an area with Galway city and is one of the oldest fishing villages in Ireland. It is also the birthplace of the Claddagh ring.

Picture number one shows the Galway Cathedral at night. The Cathedral was built, in the 1960s, on the site of an old city jail (Seems fitting for this series).

From Magma Productions:

GALWAY is an excellent location for a TV series. It is both urban and rural. It has the photogenic landscape of busy small streets, dark alleys, modern office buildings and dusty old pubs. Yet take a small drive and within minutes you arrive at John Ford’s Quiet Man landscapes of rugged Conamara hills and lakes.

To Jack Taylor, born locally, very few living in the place seem to be actually from Galway. It seems a point on the map as far as one can go from mainland Europe, England and Dublin. A place to where people seem to gravitate when there is nowhere else to go. Galway today is the place for those hippies, artists, bohemians, runaways and outlaws who can run no further and feel it is time to, if not confront the pursuing ghosts of the past, at least give them the chance to catch up.

The stories of Jack Taylor mark out this literal and metaphoric ‘out west’, somewhere struggling to burst forth from its parochial past. The Church is tainted by unthinkable sex scandals. The political class exists to grease the wheels of the wealthy. The town of Jack Taylor’s youth has been entirely transformed, Jack would not say for the better, by European and trans-Atlantic money, into some lurid version of the developers’ paradise where ordinary people can’t afford to live anymore.

The way to rise is to know when to turn a blind eye; the way to prosper is to know when to accept a brown envelope. A place where maintenance of the status quo is the currency of the day.


Second shot is of Nimmo’s Pier. According to Ken, when film crew were hauling in a dummy (acting as a corpse) from the river, locals saw it and called the guards (the police).

As the city of Galway plays a major role in Ken’s stories, I asked him if he felt the city was truly captured in THE GUARDS.

Ken: “The film really catches the city in all it’s beauty and ugliness.”

If all goes well, next week we will run some pictures of the various characters and talk about them and the actors behind them.

Check out the rest of our writings on THE GUARDS.