Archive News
Bog rights and boundary changes show how everything will always remain local
Date Published: 29-Aug-2012
As a child, I had a habit of making sure that Santa or any other sentient being, roaming around in space, didn’t confuse me with some other Harry McGee in a different galaxy.
My address was: 45 Glenard Crescent, Salthill, Galway, Co Galway, Connacht, Ireland, Europe, the World, The Universe, The Galaxy.
It was important for me to pinpoint not only who I was but where I was from – and with great exactitude.
Where you are from is the first cardinal rule of Irish politics. Sure, Tipp O’Neill’s phrase that all politics is local has been flayed to death, but it remains a truism.
The 166 national legislators in Dáil Éireann may debate on national issues and draft laws nationally but make no mistake about it, they are first and foremost representing a community and a region. This is quite unlike Britain, where prospective MPs are parachuted into far-flung constituencies with inbuilt Tory or Labour majorities – places with which they have no connection and where they visit as rarely as possible. In Ireland, such an arrangement would be unimaginable. You shun your own constituency and you quickly find that your own constituency shuns you.
And so you will find these paradoxes cropping up all the time – TDs going through the hobs of hell to protect something in their constituency, though it seems to contradict everything else they stand for nationally.
Ergo, while the euro may be staring into an abyss and the future prospects for the economy still look dodgy, the two issues that generated verbal thunder and lightning this week were turbary rights on a bog near Portumna and Phil Hogan’s big plan to register and inspect septic tanks.
That localism, or backyardism, is often criticised by commentators who argue for the Irish politics to embrace some form of a list system – where voters would vote for a particular party rather than a candidate; and some of the TDs would be selected from a list supplied by the parties or by independent groups.
The argument goes that this would widen the skill set of our political pool and bring clever well-balanced people (academics, business people, people from the world of arts and culture) into parliament that would otherwise not be there. It would also help eliminate the cult of clientelism and localism that they think bedevils Irish politics, they argue.
It is true that Irish politics does tend to be dominated by people who come from particular backgrounds – teachers and former trade union officials do tend to predominate. But you find that what marks most politicians out is their innate political nature.
People who argue for us to go out and beg Michael O’Leary and Diarmuid Ferriter and Miriam O’Callaghan to run the country fail to take one thing into account. They may be the best in their political fields, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t end up being lousy politicians.
To be a politician you need to be political in nature. And a lot of people aren’t. I don’t want to be too generalist but there are qualities that you recognise in most politicians.
The first is that they are usually outgoing and extrovert (that doesn’t mean they have to be pleasant and you do still get the odd recluse).
The second is that they have to have vast stores of patience and stamina to endure endless conversations and meetings and to field the most trivial complaints as if they were the most important piece of news that they have ever heard.
For more, read this week’s Connacht 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
images/files/images/x3_Courthouse.jpg
Families queue up for school’s offer of free house
West has lower cancer survival rates than rest
Galway minors continue to lay waste to all opponents
Gardaí and IFA issue a joint appeal on summer road safety
Marathon Man plans to call a halt – but not before he hits 160 races
