Archive News
Catering for kids’ needs is child’s play for Evelyn
Date Published: {J}
The Irish love their babies. The latest statistics from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) show we have the highest birth rate in the EU.
The birth rate of 17 per 1,000 of population is up from 14.4 per 1,000 in 2000.
So, in spite of – or is it because of? – the worst recessionary storm clouds since the 1930s we are reproducing more than our European counterparts.
It goes without saying where there’s babies there’s stuff.
One of the first things you will hear new mothers marvel about is the amount of gear a tiny creature generates. Just to leave the house requires a checklist of equipment worthy of an army reconnaissance.
That is where Bella Baby steps in.
It’s not everyone brave enough to open a business geared to the middle-and high-end markets when the economy is crumbling around us.
But that’s exactly what Evelyn Garvey decided to do back in 2008.
Just three years after setting up, the 34-year-old has opened her second shop in the upmarket Dundrum Shopping Centre in Dublin and has been shortlisted in the Maternity & Infant magazine awards for best baby store of the year, which are the Oscars of the baby world.
Back in 2007 she was a manager in a Vodafone store and expecting her first baby. She and her sister, Sheila who was also pregnant for the first time, would head off together shopping for the essentials for a newborn. But they found themselves feeling slightly intimidated.
“You’d have people saying, ‘didn’t you know you needed that?’. It wasn’t a nice shopping experience. I saw a gap in the market,” recalls Evelyn. “I wanted a nice looking shop, competitively priced with all the top quality products and brands. I wanted somewhere that had a very personal service.”
And so Bella Baby was born – named after Evelyn’s firstborn, Ella and her sister’s boy, Ben, who was born just six weeks later.
While on maternity leave, they travelled to the trade shows and hit the suppliers and came away with the firm belief that this would be a nice business to get into.
The next job was to source a shop. As rents were still too high in town, they settled on Oranmore, which had the double advantage of having free parking and easy access from the dual carriageway.
Evelyn had absolutely no previous knowledge or training about starting your own business.
After secondary school in Salerno, the Bushypark girl went to college in Birmingham to study tourism and business management.
She returned to Galway to do a post grad in marketing then took a year off to work in Sydney, where she was in the recruitment industry.
When the visa expired, she came home and worked for a while in the reception of the Skeff hotel on Eyre Square while waiting for her father’s pub on the other side of the square to be renovated. Here she met her husband, Paul Shaughnessy, who was the Skeff manager.
Evelyn believes it was through working with her father, Cathal, in Garvey’s pub that she got her work ethic, honed over many summers and weekends while in school.
Eleven months after Ella was born she opened the doors of Bella Baby and was astounded at the response.
“It just started off well. I was here working seven days a week. When you’ve a good bit of personality, people want to come into you. That’s half the battle. Everybody here has a personality,” Evelyn explains.
“I never thought we’d have people from outside Galway coming but we had customers from Limerick, Cork, Wexford. . . They came by word of mouth. We also developed a very strong web presence so had some customers who wanted to buy online. Of course there are always people who need to touch and feel things before they buy.”
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
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
