Archive News
Chairman Tim set for love of his life
Date Published: 26-Jul-2012
The Galway Races kick off on Monday and when the week-long festival finishes it brings to a close a steady five weeks of partying in the city.
Of course, the last day of the racing festival week doesn’t mean the end of fun in Galway, it just means the end of formal, organised fun for a few weeks until the oysters are celebrated in September.
And while everyone has their own favourite festival, Chairman of the Galway Race Committee, Tim Naughton obviously believes Race Week is the best event.
”Racing is the biggest sporting interest I have. It’s the love of my life. My three sisters and I were brought up to Ballybrit when we were children as my father was involved in the Races, so I suppose I grew up with it.”
Tim looks forward the most to the Galway Plate day though obviously as chairman of the Race Committee, he will be at the racecourse every day of the seven-day festival.
But he says he has in recent years cut down on the social side of the popular festival in order to pace himself.
“Margaret (Tim’s wife) and I get invited here, there and everywhere to dinner after the Races but we have cut down on a lot of that.”
He admits he is very proud of the improved facilities at Ballybrit and believes that Galway led the way for other racing festivals around the country.
“I believe we were one of the first racing festivals to have a Best Dressed Lady competition. Ours was started by the late Fergus Foley of The Blue Cloak and of course Anthony Ryans have built it up into the fantastic event that it is now.”
While fashion and style are not his forte he says, he appreciates how the Best Dressed event and Ladies Day opens out the festival to others and if anything the Galway Races have increasingly managed to attract racegoers across the board, young and old, to include serious punters and fun lovers.
“The committee was always led by local business people and I believe that is why the Galway Races have always been customer led. We have improved the facilities at Ballybrit over the years as a direct response to customer demand. When you run a shop you tend to be customer focused.”
He has high praise for the late Lord Killanin, who spearheaded the drive that made the Galway Races the success they are today. He says it was also a stroke of genius hiring a full-time manager/secretary at the racecourse. The first one was Captain Luke Mullins, currently it is John Maloney, whom Tim describes as a man who has transformed the festival.
“And of course, when we took on John, we got his wife Noreen as well, who is wonderful,” he recently said at the launch of this year’s programme for Galway Races.
He loves how Lord Killanin frowned upon corporate boxes and he always resisted that type of segregation. “What I love about Galway is that you don’t know who you will bump into, anyone from a Taoiseach to a celebrity from the entertainment world.”
A semi-retired businessman, Tim was a former city retailer or a shopkeeper as he says himself. He was the third generation in the Naughtons hardware and homeware business on Shop Street.
He is very proud of being a Galwayman. Both of his parents were born and reared in the city and all four grandparents came from the county. His mother, Nora’s parents, who had a shop in Eyre Square were Michael Newell and Mary Farragher, both from Annaghdown.
His father’s parents were Tim Naughton from Attymon and Margaret Keary from Woodford. Her family was involved in the Land War back in the 1880s. She was one of a large family so Tim has cousins all over the place, he says.
The only boy in the family, he knew he was always destined for the family business and was sent to do a B Comm to prepare for the future. He also took a BA in History and French.
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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