Archive News
Dream come through as St. ThomasÕ bask in title glory
Date Published: 20-Mar-2013
STEPHEN GLENNON
THE proverbial dust settles. St. Thomas’ captain Robert Murray draws his first breath and the significance of what his small, rural club has achieved begins to filter its way through his neural pathways. Beyond the creaks of the bones, Murray smiles.
For the previous two hours, life was a blur but now that the Tommy Moore Cup sits proudly in the St. Thomas’ dressing-room, Murray and his friends can allow the adrenalin and the damp, sodden shingle of the Croke Park swarth to wash away under the post-match showers. Clarity descends.
“I don’t know what to do with myself really,” muses Murray, who, like his team-mates, had been consumed for over two years with winning their first county and, later, All-Ireland senior hurling titles. For some of the St. Thomas’ faithful, that ambition had enveloped them even longer but, in any event, there’s a temporary void in Murray’s world.
“I never thought it would happen. I suppose, I was thinking about the All-Ireland alright for the last couple of weeks but when you think about it so much, you don’t know what is real and what is not real. I am in that kind of frame of mind now. It will take a while to sink in.”
Even as he deposits his gear on the team bus, he is still trying to make sense of it all – in a good way – of their 1-11 to 1-9 All-Ireland club final victory. However, all he can muster are surreal images of high balls, flashes of Thomas’ red and blue, Kilcormac/Killoughey’s green and yellow, and the elation and euphoria of lifting the Cup in the Hogan Stand.
“I was just saying to Cathal (Burke), our corner back. I felt I was watching it from outside of my body,” continues Murray. “It was a strange thing but that was the occasion I suppose. Once the ball came in [to the defence], and you had to deal with it every so often, you were happy and, thankfully, we were able to keep enough scores out.”
The 2013 hurling decider was by no means a classic and it’s rare the football showpiece – in which St. Brigid’s of Roscommon claimed a 2-11 to 2-10 victory over Ballymum Kickhams – will boast of more scores.
That said, St. Thomas’ won’t care. For them, the hurling final had its fair share of moments – the most important one being Murray raising the Cup aloft alongside Kenneth Burke and long-time club servant, Enda Tannian.
Yet, there were times when the Offaly champions threatened to abscond with the silverware – and the Kilchreest/Peterswell dream – no more so when their full-forward Trevor Fletcher pounced for his side’s goal on 17 minutes. What made it hurt all the more was that just minutes earlier St. Thomas’ had taken the lead for the first time.
“They got a great tonic there with a goal when we seemed to be getting a hold of the game,” agrees Murray. “I think we seemed to be more dangerous [going forward] really but then they gave us a real kick. They let us know that they were in the game too.
“In fairness, though, they are a tough team to break down and we found that there in that match. They were really dogged and really on top of us all the time, blocking and hooking. We weren’t getting scores easy and it looked as if we should have got them easy. We were making hard work of it but, thankfully, we got the rub of the green.”
Indeed, a goal from his older brother Richard on 24 minutes saw the Galway men enter the half-time break with a two-point advantage, 1-7 to 1-5, but their aspirations of pushing on in the third quarter proved to be just that and it was Kilcormac/Killoughey who held a 1-9 to 1-7 lead entering the closing stages.
For more, read this week’s Connacht 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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