Archive News
Councillor says litter strewn childrens’ park ’embarrassing’
Date Published: {J}
By Dara Bradley
A new initiative encouraging city community groups to ‘take ownership’ of parks and playgrounds in their areas will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
City Hall is planning to ask community groups to ‘adopt’ Galway City Council owned parks – the groups will be asked to visit the amenities during out-of-hours times to check for anti-social behaviour. The groups will also be asked to carry out voluntary clean-ups.
The move comes following confirmation from the Council that its cleaning regime at weekends is being curtailed due to a lack of funding to pay for staff overtime.
The ‘adopt a park’ initiative also comes after the state of a popular city playground has been branded as a “disgrace” after alcohol cans and bottles were strewn over it at the weekend.
City Councillor Pádraig Conneely says the Children’s Millennium Park on University Road was covered in litter – including broken Buckfast bottles and beer cans – when he visited it on Sunday morning.
The bins were overflowing and had not been emptied, added the Fine Gael Cllr, who has demanded a report from City Hall into the litter blackspot.
More than 40 young children and their parents visited the park on Sunday and Cllr Conneely said it was an “embarrassment” that the Council has failed to keep the park clean.
The park has been the subject of alcohol-related litter in the past although the problem is understood to have been exacerbated by underage drinking during the schools’ mid-term break.
A Council spokesperson acknowledged it was aware of the situation at the Children’s Millennium Park.
Eyre Square, Salthill and the city centre are cleaned seven days a week but the Millennium Park is cleaned just on weekdays although the Council is hoping, subject to staffing issues, the park will be included in weekend cleaning soon.
The spokesperson said that the park used to be locked every night at 9pm but this is no longer happening due to a shortfall in funding to pay staff overtime. Regardless of whether the park is locked or not, it can be easily accessed at night if people are determined enough to jump the gates, he said. “There’s only so much we can do. We can’t be there all night picking up after them”.
In the short-term, Council staff will continue to clean the park, and hope to extend the cleaning regime to weekends.
The Parks’ Department of the Council also hopes to encourage community groups to ‘adopt’ parks in their areas, which will encourage locals to take ownership of their amenities, he added.
“Linking up with local community groups to adopt parks won’t solve the immediate problem but we are trying to be proactive and its about people taking ownership of public space in the city,” he said.
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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