Archive News
‘Galway West Plate’ FG win was the ‘tightest’ in country – that’s official !
Date Published: {J}
The world and its mother has spent the past week poring over newspapers and results in a bid to analyse for racing form – so, in keeping with the tradition The Deputy has been looking up the records, to find that the luckiest winner in the country in the General Election was in Galway West.
That fact is revealed in a huge new guide to the February election which was published in recent weeks, the RTE This Week in Politics results book – which shows that Galway’s new TD Sean Kyne (FG), had the narrowest winning margin in the entire country.
Correspondingly, Galway City Councillor Catherine Connolly (Independent) had the smallest losing margin in all of the more than 40 constituencies in the country – pipped at the post by Kyne by just 17 votes.
In what I choose to call the Galway West Plate (where the first five past the post get a Dáil seat and umpteen thousands added) her losing margin was much smaller than other tight contests such as in Wicklow (112), Cavan-Monaghan, and Dublin, which all featured in the national top 10.
The figures show that, when Connolly and Kyne were left in the running in the final stretch – the difference was Kyne 9,112, Connolly 9,095. It had been an incredible run by Connolly, a regular for some years now in the Galway West Plate, but she had been beaten by a nose by the FG newcomer.
In fact Kyne had been a late addition to ‘the field’, having been added after a convention in which the two runners selected for FG were Senator Fidelma Healy-Eames and Councillor Brian Walsh, while the stable connections at the selection convention had turned down long-time stalwart and multiple Galway West winner Padraic McCormack.
The FG stable bosses in Dublin chose to add newcomers Kyne and Hildegarde Naughton with Kyne cashing in on a catastrophic drop in support for Fianna Fáil in Connemara and throughout the constituency – which saw support melt away for that great ould FF stayer Frank Fahey, while that other stayer Eamon Ó Cuív held on to place, despite a drop in his popularity with the punters.
Kyne was the winner from a ‘second TD for Connemara’ plot which was hatched out in Fine Gael Headquarters. The connections felt that the votes were there to elect a second TD from within Connemara (apart from Ó Cuív), but one of the results was that the four-runner strategy (Walsh, Kyne, Healy-Eames and Naughton), possibly scuttled the chances of Healy-Eames . . . or at least the Healy-Eames connections felt that way about it.
It all creates a very challenging situation for newcomer Kyne. By the way, I should say he drew the biggest applause of the night at the Fine Gael convention in the Salthill Hotel where he made a rousing speech stitching the outgoing FF-Green Government’s awful performance into the record, on a night when the FG convention seemed a downbeat affair which was tense because of the doubt as to whether long-service TD McCormack was about to be shafted by the delegates.
The challenge to Kyne now is that, if Connolly is the narrowest loser in the country in the last election, then the winner of that fifth seat in Galway, Kyne, is the holder of the most marginal Dáil seat in the country.
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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