A decade after Albert Power’s death, his son James Power (1918–2009) created the headstone for the grave of Pádraic Ó Conaire at Bohermore Cemetery, Galway — extending the Power family’s connection to Ó Conaire’s memory into a second generation.
Ó Conaire (born Patrick Joseph Conroy, 1882–1928) was a pioneering Irish-language writer, best known for his novel Deoraíocht (Exile). Following his death in Dublin in 1928, a Galway memorial committee raised funds for a headstone, and the response was generous enough that Albert Power — by then Ireland’s foremost sculptor — was commissioned instead to create a full memorial statue, unveiled in Eyre Square in June 1935 by Éamon de Valera before a crowd of some 3,000 people.
James Power’s headstone at the writer’s actual grave in Bohermore Cemetery is a quieter, more private counterpart to his father’s famous public monument — created not for the city’s main square but for the place where Ó Conaire himself is buried.
This work is documented by Galway City Museum, which credits a photograph of Albert Power at work to Christopher Noel Power — Albert’s grandson and James’s nephew — confirming the family’s continued connection to the Ó Conaire memorial across three generations.