Archive News
County player at the heart of AnnaghdownÕs glory bid
Date Published: 25-Oct-2012
HAVING won almost every honour in the game – from All-Ireland minor to senior medals – by the age of 19, Annaghdown ladies footballer Niamh Duggan expected that her list of honours would grow . . . and grow . . . and grow. Yet, fortune designed to deal a very different hand.
The emergence of Cork ladies as a superpower – they have won every All-Ireland senior title, except one, since 2005 – deprived Duggan and Galway of further success following their historic win a year earlier while ‘bad luck’ and, arguably, inadequate structures to build on significant underage success has meant the Tribeswomen have slipped down the pecking order.
Naturally, by association, Duggan’s star waned – as did those of her team-mates – although they have continued to fight the good fight and they received their just rewards for their endeavours when, as underdogs, they captured this year’s Connacht senior title with a shock win over Mayo in July.
“In fairness, to get a Connacht title out of the way things would have been earlier in the year was a great achievement. It shows the potential is there,” says Duggan, who heaps praise on manager Gabriel Naughton, trainer Nigel Concannon and the backroom staff for turning around the team’s fortunes following the National League (Division 2) final mauling to the same opposition and the subsequent resignation of then boss Con Moynihan.
Duggan, herself, had missed that furore as she only moved back home from Dublin, where she played for three years with Sword’s outfit Fingallians, in the Spring and she did not join the Galway panel until Naughton took charge in early Summer.
In any event, under Naughton, Galway did put a fine run together, only later to lose out to Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final. Still, hope at senior level has flickered once again. For Duggan, her zest for the game – not that it had ever extensively diminished – is now burning brightly and another reason for this is the rebirth of her own club Annaghdown.
For this Sunday, at McHale Park, Castlebar, Annaghdown will not only contest the Connacht Junior ‘A’ decider against St. Farnans of Sligo (1:30pm) but they will bid – and this is open to correction – to become the first team from the parish to claim a provincial football title.
Certainly, Annaghdown have the talent to see the job through but Duggan and others will need little reminding that they have been in a similar position before – in 2006 – and come up short. On that occasion, they lost the intermediate final to Geevagh after a replay. It was heartbreaking stuff.
Since then, Annaghdown have gone senior, been quickly demoted back to intermediate and fallen to the lower echelons of the local game, where they have languished in recent years. That was until they claimed the Junior ‘A’ county title with a cracking 4-7 to 2-10 victory over Leitir Móir last month – full-forward Grainne Barrett tallying three of the Annaghdown goals.
In the semi-final of the Connacht championship, they faced Leitrim champions Annaduff and this also turned out to be a thriller with the Galway women surviving an early scare to win 4-10 to 4-8. “We had a shocking first half really and they hit us with a soft goal in the first few minutes,” recalls Duggan.
“They went five points up and then we got a sin-bin. Even when we were a player down, though, we were still creating chances for ourselves. So, we knew, bit by bit, we could claw it back and we knew we were still in with a chance.
“I suppose, the competition in Galway stood to us. The Leitrim manager remarked on that. Annaduff didn’t have matches like that game in their own county where in Galway the competition is fierce. So, that stood to us and I think in almost every game we had to come from behind to win it.”
It was Barrett, once again, who proved the hero with all four goals against Annaduff and, to some degree, she has taken over the mantle of leading the attack from Duggan, who has been redeployed from the forwards to centre-half back. It is just one of a number of astute switches made by the management team led by Thomas Murphy and former Mayo All-Star Pauline Curry (nee Mullen).
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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