Archive News
Bernard has spark to inspire students
Date Published: 08-Nov-2012
The director of the Galway Education Centre is such a dynamo of energy that the day we arranged to meet he was on the other side of the country.
Not even Bernard Kirk could have made the trek back from Donegal in time for our 11.30pm meeting on a sunny Wednesday after we got our wires crossed and he was instead addressing a national education meeting.
Getting stood up may have meant getting off on the wrong foot, but not with Bernard. A more effusive and warm person you are unlikely to meet.
The 50-year-old Cork native has so many ideas about education that he hardly draws a breath. The Galway Education Centre is one of most innovative of 21 around the country whose primary focus is on training primary and secondary school teachers as well as devising and running programmes for students and teachers.
There are tears in his eyes as he recounts his biggest motivation when it comes to improving education for young people.
“I was working on the building sites in London for three years. I used to get up at 5am and collect all these fellas on Holloway Road. The ganger used to pick them up only if they had dirty boots. They would earn £30 a day. They were just cannon fodder,” he reflects.
“I remember working with guys who hadn’t been home in 30, 40 years. Once the ganger went away after his mother had died and he gave me the money for the guys for the week. I had to give £50 on a Friday, £50 on a Monday and £20 on a Wednesday. They never had any money to put away. They were like slaves. They could almost see Ireland but couldn’t make it.
“I thought if I ever get a chance to work with the next generation I’d help give them the skills not to be in that situation again. I know it’s happening at the minute again but I’d hope they wouldn’t be in a position to be exploited like that generation were.”
The energy Bernard exudes fits right at home in the semi-circular building designed by architect Shane de Blacam with its storey-and-a-half height lecture rooms.
Unless you are a teacher or student, you may not have even heard of the Galway Education Centre, which sits proudly beside the old Redemptorist monastery that is now home to art and design and film and television students of GMIT.
The idea behind its design was to create a space of learning for adults and children which would not feel like school.
A former national school teacher himself in Claregalway for 13 years until 1997, Bernard was appointed Director of the Centre just three years after joining a voluntary committee of teachers who manage it.
He had only heard about education centres through doing a Masters in Education with his wife Treasa. Although the course was being run by Trinity, many of the modules were held in these facilities around the country.
His wife was also the reason he moved to Galway. After meeting in the teaching training college in Limerick, he followed the Clare woman here when she got a job at Scoil Íde in Salthill.
Treasa went on to do a PhD in co-operative learning which was later adopted by the Irish system. She became a school inspector but is currently working on policy in the Education Department. The couple have two daughters and live in Rockbarton, Salthill.
Memorable curriculum changes overseen by the Centre include the transition from the Inter Cert to the Junior Cert, the introduction of religion as a Leaving Cert subject, the rolling out of the relationships and sexuality education in primary and secondary schools and the move from technical graphics to design and communication graphics, where 40% of the exam is now computer based.
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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