Archive News
Every parent’s nightmare – how tragedy came knocking
Date Published: {J}
It was because he had such a tough start to life that Kieran Cunningham’s parents, Donie and Bernie, used to love seeing him excitedly run out the door for a night out in Galway with his friends and work-mates.
For a lad who sat his Leaving Certificate at 19, who had such a passion for hurling and kickboxing, he had been making up for lost time. Kieran had only begun socialising a few months before that fateful night in June 2009. He rushed in from his job in Hughes’ supermarket, the rap music blaring in the bedroom, had a quick shower, and sprinted down the hallway to wait for his lift into the city.
His job behind the deli-counter in Claregalway had opened up a whole new world of friends, nights out, and DVDs in work-mates’ houses for the Slieve Finn youngster. His father, who always enjoyed a good bit of banter with Kieran, could not get over how the job had transformed his 5’1” son’s life over the space of a year.
“When he got the job first, I thought he’d never stick it,” says Donie. “He’d have been lackadaisical. He would be smiling at you and tell you to go and get something yourself. But when he got behind that counter, something changed in him. He was a little flyer. He actually thrived on the job. It changed him. When he went behind the counter he was a totally different character. He was buzzing. He was so sharp, he’d remember exactly what people used to order from one week to the next.”
Donie used to keep a newspaper cutting from the Connacht Tribune in his wallet, from four years earlier. Still does. Kieran had lined out in a County U-16 final for Annaghdown. The little wing-back was the smallest man on the field, but scored 2-6 and walked away with the Man of the Match award. His dad was so proud.
Kieran arrived into this world three months premature, weighing less than two pounds. Bernie was lying in a coma in the Intensive Care Unit at University Hosptial Galway for ten days. The two of them were anointed by a priest that morning, 15 minutes apart. Donie met the priest as he made his way into the Premature Babies Unit at UHG. And he made a pact with God.
“The doctors pulled me aside when I went in to see him in the incubator,” says Donie. “They told me I would have to come to terms with the fact that we were going to lose him. They said ‘you can always have another child’. That morning I asked them could I open the porthole in the incubator. I just tickled him with my small finger. His hands were opened. He got a grip on my finger. And the grip that he had for that size!”
Donie described it as being like a ‘jump start’ of power. He told the doctors that he had not given up on his son. Within a couple of hours, tiny Kieran was taking drops of milk. “You don’t forget these things,” says his Dad.
For his first four or five years, Kieran had been constantly in and out of hospital. He got pneumonia twice and had a weak lung. He needed to use an inhaler to help him breathe. His parents used to listen to him coughing in the cot or bed at night, afraid that he might smother himself. When they would look in, though, he would just smile. Kieran never complained and, gradually, his health began to improve. By nine or ten, he was able for the battles on the Annaghdown hurling fields.
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
images/files/images/x3_Courthouse.jpg
Families queue up for school’s offer of free house
West has lower cancer survival rates than rest
Galway minors continue to lay waste to all opponents
Gardaí and IFA issue a joint appeal on summer road safety
Marathon Man plans to call a halt – but not before he hits 160 races
