Archive News
Cllrs clash on lobbying for grant to big snooker event
Date Published: 19-Mar-2013
By Dara Bradley
A Galway City Councillor has been criticised by a political rival for lobbying colleagues to sink €10,000 of public funds into last weeks’ international snooker event hosted by a commercial company for which he, and his brother, are associated with.
City Councillor Pádraig Conneely (FG) questioned whether Galway City Council was right to give €10,000 for an international sports event run by an events company associated with Labour Party City Councillor Niall McNelis and his brother, Shay McNelis.
Cllr McNelis said the criticism was an attempt to tarnish his name; he insisted that he did not benefit financially from the event and was only involved in a voluntary capacity. He also said the Council’s money was ‘money well spent’ and was used to promote Galway around the world including to millions of television viewers.
“I’m not a director of the company, I’m not a partner in the company, I’ve no financial gain whatsoever . . . my involvement is purely in a voluntary capacity,” stressed Cllr McNelis.
The €10,000 funding was granted to T.H.E Agency, an events company that organised the Players Tour Championship Grand Finals, a for-profit snooker event that concluded in NUI Galway on Sunday. The money was to promote the city at the event, and the Council agreed at the eleventh hour to grant the monies when alternative funding from Fáilte Ireland failed to materialise.
Members of the City Council’s Corporate Policy Group (CPG) received a presentation from Connor Coyle of T.H.E. Agency on Monday where he sought €15,000 in sponsorship from the Council in return for advertising space at the televised snooker event.
Cllr McNelis, who is not a member of the CPG, is named as being a component of the company T.H.E Agency (The Helpful Entertainment Agency). He had asked that the CPG hear the presentation from Mr Coyle.
“The organisers of the PTC Final are World Snooker and an Irish events company, T.H.E Agency, this is made up of Shea McNelis, Connor Coyle and Niall McNelis,” reads the document circulated to CPG members.
Cllr McNelis has also declared that he is “promoter T.H.E Agency” in the occupations/profession/remuneration section of the most recent declarations of interests, which are filed at City Hall and must be filled out by elected representatives yearly. Voluntary roles are not generally included in the register.
The CPG agreed to provide €10,000 for the event, and this was subsequently passed by a majority of Councillors at the full Council meeting later on Monday.
Eleven of the 12 Councillors present voted for the funding – Cllr Catherine Connolly was not present due to illness, Cllr McNelis absented himself from the meeting for the vote and Cllr Conneely dissented.
Cllr Conneely yesterday questioned whether the funding would have been granted if he, rather than Cllr McNelis, was promoting the event. “I doubt very much it would, it wouldn’t even have been discussed, it’d be thrown out,” he said.
He said Cllr McNelis was a promoter for the event, and therefore there was a conflict in him lobbying for it to get funds.
The €10,000 comes from a fund established by the Council late last year to promote events that would bring tourists to the city.
There is around €275,000 in the fund, yet no guidelines are in place as to how it should be dispersed. Both Cllrs Conneely and McNelis voted for the establishment of that fund.
The City Manager issued draft guidelines on how the marketing fund should be administered but it was only a discussion document and the guidelines haven’t been passed. They were distributed at the CPG meeting on Monday.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.
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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