City Lives –  Denise McNamara meets Michael Mackey, award-winning Simon Community volunteer

When asked what age he is, Michael Mackey’s response is simple: “I’m 61 and the happiest man in the world.”

The sheer glee in his voice as the Claddagh man answers this question stops you in your tracks. Here is a man who has sunk to the depths of despair and somehow managed to climb out, reaching the pinnacle of a ladder that he could barely have dreamed of.

If ever there was a poster boy for turning your life around, Michael Mackey is it.

This month he was given a national award for his work with the Galway Simon Community. He was honoured in the Social Work category of the Volunteer Ireland Awards and attended a gala awards ceremony at Dublin City Hall.

Michael has brought his two awards along to the interview; one is a framed picture, the other a glass trophy and he beams as he points out the features.

Before meeting Michael for a cuppa in Born Cafe one Wednesday afternoon, I pass by a man in his 40s who is regular street drinker, his foot has been broken and he hobbles along with a walking aid, his face red from the elements, his clothes drenched from the heavy December rain.

I ask him about the guys he once drank with – there were a group of about 20 of them who used to gather in Eyre Square and Shop Street – and whether any of them were inspired to follow in his footsteps. He shakes his head.

“Quite a few of them have died – the vast majority of them. Mainly from the alcohol and the weather,” he says matter of factly.

Michael grew up in a family of fishermen, one of three boys, raised single-handedly by their mother Mary Mackey.

As a youngster he used to do some shell fishing. The minute he had made his Confirmation, he left school. “They didn’t think I could go no further. So I started selling newspapers. The Sentinel. The Tribune. My pitch was in Bohermore on Friday. It was great money. That time all the money went on the tables. Sometimes two shillings went down the stocking but you’d be asked to remove it so you’d keep nothing.”

He graduated to a messenger boy, delivering groceries with McCambridge’s, clothes for Brennan’s, meat for Kirwan’s and hardware for Raftery’s for about five years.

Michael then worked as a labourer with Galway Corporation before polishing glass with Galway Crystal before it closed down in 1979. He got a job on the Docks working on the big oil tanks and it was around that time his problems started to materialise.

“I was alcohol addicted. I was creeping into it. I was missing days. I had no interest in work. I was interested in getting paid but not working. I got sick, between the alcohol and mental health issues, I wasn’t too good.”

It was years later that Michael was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But back then he blamed it all on a bit too much gargle.

“I was a different personality, a different person. I was saying things and doing things to make out I was someone else. You could be a bank manager, or a movie star. I was so caught up in the alcohol. I was drinking everything I could get my hands on. Anything and everything.”

He had lived with his mother in the Claddagh, but he moved out of his own accord.

“From the time I was became homeless it wasn’t the nightmare some people say. I didn’t like anybody telling me what to do. There used to be two boats opposite Claddagh Church, there was a couple in one and I sheltered in the other, or sometimes under a bench. You have your own routine.

He cannot say how long he remained homeless, but it was a long time. To survive, he took to begging, which he found he had an aptitude for.

“I’d be telling different stories to different people. It was like trying to run a business. I’d sit on the stone seat opposite Claddagh Church and think which way to go, which direction to take. You’d only have to meet one – not 100. Sometimes they’d give you a lot of money, you’d give them some story about trying to stay out of prison, trying to keep your home, sure I was never in trouble with the guards.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

City Lives – Denise McNamara meets Carl Hession, composer, musician and retired teacher

Although he has spent his life’s work teaching young people to play music, Carl Hession’s first experience with a music teacher was less than inspiring.

A local woman taught himself and his two sisters piano near their home in Belclare, outside Tuam. “I remember she sent a note home to my mother. The two girls are quite good, but the boy is useless – don’t send him back,” he recalls.

Fortunately it did not deter Carl. It was almost inevitable that he would end up immersed in music, such was the rich musical legacy he came from.

His father was handyman by day and fiddler by night, who played with a céilí band. His aunt was Maggie Hession, who was one of the main singers in a famous collection of Connacht songs in Irish the 1920s called Amhráin Mhuighe Seóla, one of the very few to contain notated melodies as well as words. Most of them were love songs; they were collected across Galway and Mayo by Eileen Costello, who was active in the War of Independence and became a senator in the Irish Free State.

The Hession home was an open house for traditional music, peopled by a seemingly endless succession of well-known musicians, among them uilleann pipers Seamus Ennis and Willie Clancy, fiddler Ted Furey and accordionist Joe Burke.

“At that stage I would be called upon to accompany them on the piano. I’d stay up half the night with them and then go to school the next morning,” he recalls, smiling at the memory.

The family moved to Salthill and Carl was sent to St Pat’s and the Bish, where he was more into sport than music. When he started lessons with Vera Dooley whose family were jazz musicians, he made a huge leap forward in his musical education.

“She was a big influence. She taught classical and I did quite a lot of theory exams. In one exam through the London College of Music (LCM) I got 100%. I was given the gold medal for first place in the British Isles for the ALCM theory exam by the college director William Lloyd Webber – father of Andrew. I remember my mother saying at the time, what a strange name he had.”

While still in school Carl joined several bands of all sorts of genres – traditional, pop and one them, called Plain Lazy, was a jazz rock outfit.

“That band was very ahead of its time. The stuff was so way out there people would ring to see if we were playing and then wouldn’t turn up.”

He travelled throughout the province to compete in fleadhanna ceoil and has a number of titles, among them an All-Ireland medal as a trio with accordion player Joe Burke and fiddler Kathleen Collins.

He completed a degree in history and economics at UCG (now NUIG) and did a HDip. After getting his second diploma in piano (LLCM) he decided to go to University College Cork to study music.

It was from there that Carl branched out into composition under the watchful eye of department head, Professor Aloys Fleischmann.

“Prof Fleischmann was a brilliant teacher and composer. In our second year we worked continually on harmony and counterpoint. It was very academic. In the final year we had to write a fugue in the style of Bach – it was a three-hour original piece.

“It wasn’t easy. This guy was German, he cracked the whip, but he was lovely. And brilliant. In our second and third year we had to write for the Cork Symphony Orchestra. I got very much interested in orchestration and composition.”

At weekends, Carl would return to Galway to play at the Hilltop in Salthill with Gerry Mullholland and Jackie Murphy, recording a single called Galway Bay. He was also playing with the folk band Winter Well, which was into the music of Paul Simon and James Taylor.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

City Lives – Bernie Ní Fhlatharta meets Sarah Smith, sports coach and an advocate of living well
Many people will use the next few weeks as a last ditch effort to lose a few pounds for Christmas, so that the women can fit into party dresses and the men can justify a bit more indulgence! So, it’s timely then that Sarah Smith has published an eBook aimed at those very people – well the women anyway.
The Busy Babe Bootcamp is a 14-day detoxification plan which boasts ‘eat wise – drop a size’. But it is also another way that Sarah can deliver a message she has been sharing for over 13 years in the fitness and health industry. She works as a personal trainer, nutritional advisor, tutor, sports coach and group exercise instructor.
As she says herself, “I just don’t talk the talk, I walk the walk” referring to her own healthy lifestyle and her passion for fitness, especially Kettlebells.
Sarah was one of the first in the West of Ireland to introduce Kettlebells into fitness regimes and she is the only one coaching Kettlebells as a sport. She is self-taught and was in Russia earlier his year as part of the Irish team at a Kettlebell competition, where she secured a gold and silver medal in her discipline, the Long Cycle.
She is very active as a member of the All Ireland Kettlebell Lifting Federation (AIKLF) in a campaign to make it an Olympic sport. In her Galway hub in the Hibernian FC premises on the Headford Road, Sarah coaches people who are interested in competitive Kettlebells and holds classes in the weight for people who just want to exercise.
“I love Kettlebells. I am passionate about them. I love their history too. The oldest Kettlebell is about 800 years old. They were used to weigh meat centuries ago and there’s evidence they were used in training for nearly 200 years.
“I love the way people can use them in exercising at different levels, starting with weights of four kilograms and going up to higher weights. I have been collecting them for years too, so I have them in every size.”
Sarah doesn’t do things by halves. Once she sets her heart on achieving something, she goes out and gets it, she says. A tall, slim — and very fit — blonde, Sarah has been combining healthy nutrition with exercise for almost two decades. In fact at the tender age of 17 she managed one of the first Evergreen Health Food stores in the city.
Since she was a child she has been helping out in her parents’ health store which they ran for 27 years in Ennis before opening up Open Sesame Healthfoods in Gort nine years ago. At the age of 21, she opened her own shop, Bliss, in the Eyre Square Centre. That has since closed so she could concentrate on exercise and her beloved Kettlebells. She ran the gym at the NUI Galway Kingfisher club until recently.
“For a while I ran an exercise class in my little rented house in Mill Street, but I also did house calls, lugging the gear in and out of my small car, but I loved it at the time,” she smiles.
She probably got her work ethic from her parents, Sally and Hugo, both English, who settled in Kilbeacanty, near Gort, to rear their family. Hugo was also a musician who played with the band Pyramid, formerly known as Love Biscuit. They were “a bit alternative” and home-schooled their children, including Sarah, until she reached the age of seven.
She has a natural curiosity and sense of adventure that must have been nurtured during those early years. Sarah has worked in Australia where she honed her gym skills and, having been brought up with organic food and natural products, she makes her own skincare rather than buy it – she has sensitive skin and wants to know exactly what’s she’s applying to her face.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.