Archive News
A whole new image of the Ôghost townÕ crops up
Date Published: {J}
I’m from a generation which tended to spend an enormous amount of time of its youth in the local cinemas – television didn’t come to the West of Ireland until the 1960s, and it wasn’t unusual for gangs of maybe 10 youngsters to head off to ‘the pictures’ a few times a week.
There was a ritual involved. Just about everybody seemed to ‘call’ for everybody else and, before you knew it, groups of 10 or more from one street were traipsing the town to the local flea pit to see the likes of Mickey Rooney, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in the latest movie.
Of course, the ritual also involved forbidden things like buying a few cigarettes among the lot of us and gaily puffing away in ‘the fourpennies’. Those were the times when not alone could you smoke in public, and in a cinema, but having the odd fag was regarded as part and parcel of the macho business of going to the pictures, and a rite of passage in growing up.
Among our particular favourites were ‘the westerns’ involving mega stars like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck . . . and the reason the whole genre came to mind this week was all that talk in the newspapers and on radio and television of ‘ghost estates’.
The idea of the ‘ghost town’ was central to many of the westerns of my youth. This would be a town made up of clapboard buildings which was slowly dry-cooking somewhere out on the edge of the desert . . . the perfect unoccupied town preserved forever in the frying heat of the desert, the signs creaking in the wind, and a tumbleweed blowing down the utterly deserted main street.
It’s not going to take such a change of image for me to picture as a ‘ghost town’ the many estates which were half-completed, or only just started, in the Celtic Tiger years and which now sit there like modern deserted villages. I might find it hard to imagine Gary Cooper walking down the street.
Of course, there are other key differences – because they are subjected to the vagaries of the Irish weather, they won’t stand perfectly preserved for years to come. If the vandals don’t get at them and smash, daub and burn them, they will slowly fall apart from dampness, and the sheer neglect of not being heated and maintained.
One of my recurring images of these reproachful ruins surely is the giant hotel which overlooks Waterford and which was once the pride and joy of the town. The curtains are flapping from the windows, the walls have been daubed, and it all stands like some rebuke to a lunacy which gripped the country.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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