Archive News
Famous name is no guarantee of unchallenged success
Date Published: {J}
How can you lose faith in a prime minister whose name is Socrates? A classical Greek Athenian philosopher who is credited as one of the founders of westerm philosophy, his namesake is now no longer considered worthy ofsorting out the economic problems of Iberian’s poor relations.
Of course when you preface Socrates with Jose – to give the outgoing Portuguese PM his full name – it loses a little bit of its lustre. It’s like being called Johnny Pele. But surely if the surname doesn’t inspire some form of confidence, we’re all bunched?
Sending Socrates to the European Union should have guaranteed the Portuguese the sort of bail-out that two men named Brian could never hope to achieve – instead he never made it out of the blocks.
Maybe they confused him with the other Socrates, the Brazilian captain of the eighties who is now remembered for three things – smoking forty fags a day, studying to be a doctor and leading one of the most talented sides his country has ever produced to precisely nothing.
The one fact that is constantly misquoted about this Socrates – he was actually called Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira but can you imagine the cost of putting that on the back of your young fella’s jersey – is that he played for UCD while studying medicine in Dublin.
And indeed Dr Socrates is a name that would fill you
with some confidence as you awaited his deliberations on your test results – although if he was smoking it might suggest that you wouldn’t be skipping out the front door with a clean bill of health.
Name association can be a wonderful thing, its mere mention according the name’s owner a status that his or her own ability would never entitle them to.
I was one part owner of a greyhound that – admittedly after a fair amount of drink – we decided to call Charlie Bird. Now this wasn’t insulting to RTE’s intrepid adventurer; he owned an equal share of the same dog.
We’d bought him at a Media Ball in Dublin, without ever laying eyes on him. More importantly, he agreed to be bought without laying eyes on us.
But we called him Charlie Bird for one reason only – the name recognition. We had a notion that our Charlie was even faster than the real thing, as quick chasing a mechanical hare as the reporter was at hunting down politicians on the Dail plinth.
And then there would be the advertising campaigns when he won a decent race: “Charlie Bird swears by Pedigree Chum”; “Charlie Bird gets his coat washed at Suds Emporium” – that sort of thing.
People would back him because they recognised his name, other dogs would fear him because of his constant yapping in the kennels. We couldn’t lose – and if we needed the extra fillip of publicity, we could parade Charlie the dog with Charlie the newshound for a publicity photograph.
So it should have been with Jose Socrates, particularly if he played down the first name. RTE’s website had a headline last week which said – in relation to his austerity proposals – simply ‘Socrates warns of rejection consequences’. How that didn’t make the natives sit up and take notice, we will never know.
And some names have more impact than others – Enda Kenny, for example, threatening to burn the banks doesn’t have half the effect it would if someone in the higher echelons of Sinn Fein issued a warning….particularly if they signed it ‘P O’Neill’ at the end of the statement.
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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