Archive News
Cards can just be for Christmas after all
Date Published: 28-Dec-2012
I’D be the first one to admit that I don’t send Christmas cards, just as I rarely bother with birthday cards, absolutely abhor Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards and can only laugh at the notion of sending them for Easter or St Patrick’s Day.
When we’re on holidays, I’m never the one to send postcards – not least because I’m always back home before they are and also because there’s nothing more annoying for the recipient than heading out to work with an image of someone else’s holiday view in your head.
And yet even I was surprised by how few Christmas cards dropped onto the doormat this year – not to mention how rare they were in the office.
Time was you couldn’t see the desk for the flow for Christmas cards. Some of them were from people you’d never heard of and some of them were from PR people and politicians who mustn’t have known me because they didn’t put my name on the card and their signature came in the form of a stamp.
Still, they were cards that could be lined up along the wall behind you as a reflection – however misguided – of your popularity in the wider world.
Now it looks like the Christmas card equivalent of tumbleweed twisting slowly along your empty shelves.
Instead we were inundated this year with emails from people who told us that they weren’t sending cards to anyone, but still managed to find fifteen seconds in their busy schedule to include us in a group message to wish us all of the joys of the season with every hope for a brighter 2013.
Some even shopped for a little animated cartoon to go along with this general mail; we had snow falling on a forest, Santa coming down a dirty, sooty chimney, Rudolph with his nose glowing red every three seconds – that sort of thing.
A few claimed they weren’t sending cards because they were donating the money to a good cause – frankly, while I’d love to believe them, I think the good cause they had in mind might have been the till of their local pub.
Perhaps my poor return is entirely my own fault for not sending cards to anyone for years – although there were other members of our household who have been more diligent and have even forged my signature on cards, so that I don’t seem like the Grinch – but maybe it’s also down to the lost art of letter writing.
These days the only handwritten notes we get are prescriptions from doctors whose writing we cannot decipher in the first place.
It’s too easy to send an email or a text, and obviously it’s not just cheaper – it’s free – but equally, you get what you pay for. And you’ll find it very hard to string text messages on a length of ribbon over the mantelpiece. I may have to review my position on sending – not just so that I start getting cards back, but just so that we can keep the tradition alive.
Memories are made of Christmas cards drawn by little hands in the classroom, spidery pictures of Santa or ones of the Baby Jesus with a giant star hovering overhead, looking perilously close to crushing the entire crib.
We remember when cards were made from thin sheets of card that wouldn’t even start a fire, before they had to become – literally – all singing, all dancing giants of things that sang jingle Bells or Silent Night every time you opened them.
Perhaps that’s where the rot set in; because instead of covering the cost of cards for all of your friends and relatives with twenty quid, it now became a major project to buy individual cards for everyone – or at least make sure that you didn’t send the same Nativity scene to two people who might then be visiting each other’s houses over the Christmas.
There’s also another side to this whole card thing – because there are many charities who depend more and more on the proceeds they receive from the sale of their Christmas cards, and that’s another good reason to stay in the loop.
But the main reason is that, despite my reservations regarding spurious celebrations concocted by card companies, there is something about a handwritten greeting that texts or emails will never beat.
And as the great man once said in a different context, it is in giving that we receive – and if we don’t play the Christmas card game by sending a few, we cannot really have cause for complaint if we then find ourselves left out of the loop.
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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