Jimmy Gralton came from Effrinagh, Drumsna, near Carrick on Shannon in Co. Leitrim. He was a farmer, an emigrant, a returned man, and a dreamer with his feet firmly rooted on Leitrim ground. He believed in education, fairness, and the dignity of the ordinary, working class people. Those beliefs made him dangerous.

In 1921, Jimmy built a hall on his land with the help of his local community. What he built was modest in size, but vast in meaning. A hall not for profit, not for power, but for people. It was a place to dance, to learn, to speak freely for a community to gather together.

Inside this hall, floorboards shook with music and dance, voices rose in debate, young people learned new steps and new ideas, and with them came confidence and possibility to the people of rural Leitrim.

From the outset, the hall was watched. The Church and local priests condemned Gralton’s ideas, the music, the dancing, and the socialising of the people. Those who attended dances were named from pulpits, scrutinised and shamed. Supporters of the hall were branded dangerous, immoral, subversive. They said, "the Devil was in that dance hall!"

The hall was attacked on several occasions. Shots were even fired into it during a dance. And on Christmas Eve 1932, it was burned to the ground in an arson attack.

Gralton was labelled “an undesirable alien” and the following year, despite being born in Ireland, he was served with a deportation order, arrested and forcibly removed from his own country - the only Irishman ever deported by the Irish Free State.

Jimmy Gralton spent the rest of his life in New York. He never returned home and died in 1945.

His story endures not only as a political injustice, but as a human one. A reminder of what can happen when music, movement and community threaten those in power, and of how fiercely, ordinary people once fought for the right to gather, to dance, and to imagine something better.

But the idea of the hall survived and Jimmy's spirit and all he stood for, lives on in the community of Effrinagh and Leitrim.

Today, we are nine local people, standing where the hall once stood, listening to the echoes of dreams that never quite faded. We are neighbours, dancers, musicians, listeners, hard workers and believers in the power of a shared space.

We will rebuild Jimmy Gralton’s hall - not as a museum, but as a living place, on the very site that the famous old tin hall once stood.

The hall will be a living, cultural community space. It will be used for dancing, music sessions, classes, talks, film screenings, rehearsals, youth programmes, and community gatherings of all kinds, echoing exactly what Jimmy Gralton intended when he first built it. The hall will be for everyone: local people, young and old, artists, learners, families, visitors, and neighbours near and far. It will be a place where tradition and new ideas sit side by side, where people can move, make, question, celebrate, and belong. Above all, it will be an open door, built on freedom, inclusion, and shared ownership, carrying the spirit of Jimmy Gralton’s vision into the present and the future.

One Hall For All - Let’s raise the roof for Gralton!

With your support, we can raise the walls again. Every contribution helps helps raise the walls, put the floor beneath the dancers, return life to that once vibrant field and open the doors of the hall to the community once again. We look forward to welcoming you in those doors someday!

Please support us, and help Gralton’s Hall rise again.

With your support we will turn the first sod on the site of Gralton’s Hall, on the 23rd June 2026 at Effrinagh Crossroads Dance. Come join us!

To get in touch with us visit our website

www.GraltonsHall.com