At the age of eleven Galway won the junior, senior, and open Belfast flute Championships in a single day.

[12] In 1982 Galway was the featured guest star on the Andy Williams Early New England Christmas special, broadcast on CBS.

In addition to his performances of the standard classical repertoire, he features contemporary music in his programmes, including new flute works commissioned by and for him by composers including David Amram, Malcolm Arnold, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, John Wolf Brennan, Dave Heath, Lowell Liebermann and Joaquín Rodrigo.

Galway performed for the Academy Award-winning ensemble recording the soundtracks of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, composed by Howard Shore.

Galway is president of Flutewise, a global charitable organisation that supports young flute players,[11][16] run by Liz Goodwin.

[20] Galway is a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity,[21] and an ambassador of the UK charity Help Musicians.

He married his second wife, Anna (Annie) Renggli, a daughter of a well-known Swiss architect, in 1972, and moved from Berlin to Lucerne, Switzerland, her hometown.

[5][13] After this divorce, he moved to Meggen, Switzerland, a village next to Lucerne, where he resides now with his third wife, the American-born flute player Jeanne Galway (née Cinnante), whom he married in 1984.

[25][26] Galway is a devout Christian who visits various types of churches while travelling (as long as they are not – in his view – modern and "happy-clappy"), and prays before his concert performances.

In August 1977, Galway was run over by a speeding motorcycle in Lucerne, breaking his left arm and both legs and required a four-month hospital stay.

He was critical of the actions of the Northern Irish government during his childhood, and singled out prominent Unionist figures such as Ian Paisley whom Galway blamed for fostering the divisions that led to The Troubles.

[32][33] George's elder child and James's nephew, Martin Galway, is a musician known for his work on Commodore 64 computer game music in the 1980s.