Galway’s culture – you won’t find it in fancy 2020 bid books

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Now that Galway has been short-listed for the European Capital of Culture 2020 – well done Galway, ya ride ya – it is perhaps an apt time to ponder the city’s culture.

We mean Galway’s real culture. Of the variety you won’t find in any official ‘bid book’. Or #IBackGalway hash-tags trending on Twitter.

Think Galway’s drink culture; where getting scuttered after a day watching horses run around a field, or while wearing a Donegal GAA jersey at 10am while waiting for student pubs to open on a certain Tuesday, is socially acceptable. Drunkenness is such a cultural norm in Galway you could fill an entire bid book on it.

So too our culture of treating people with mental health like they’re pariahs. Galway, where we have a culture of closing mental health beds in Ballinasloe, and cramming mentally ill patients into a psychiatric unit in University Hospital Galway (UHG) where they must first pass through the overcrowded Emergency Department.

A culture exists where patients expressing suicidal thoughts could just as easily be told to ‘take an overdose’ in order to get into the psychiatric unit, and those who are in there can abscond and take their own life. And there’s no outrage . . . sure isn’t it part of our culture?

Of course psychiatric patients aren’t the only ones treated with contempt in culturally diverse Galway. We also have a culture of allowing sick, vulnerable and often elderly patients wait on trolleys for hours on end in corridors of the Emergency Department.

It is now a cultural norm to spend hours in ED . . . and if you’re lucky enough to get seen in the ED described by the Taoiseach as “not fit for purpose” and have been treated but have no nursing home to go to, it’s your fault and you’re a bed-blocker.

And what about our culture of profligacy? This is a city where a culture of paying shed-loads of money for things we don’t need/nobody wants, like a revamped Eyre Square or an art house cinema, prevails. That’s not in any bid-book either.

We could go on – Galway’s culture of discrimination of Travellers, of electing gombeen politicians, of teachers and their children sleeping rough in their cars, of spending hours and hours on end in traffic jams and so on and so forth – but you get the drift.

So every time over the course of the next year you hear someone talk about ‘backing Galway’ in its bid for city of culture, spare a thought for Galway’s true cultural heroes, the three Ps: the pissheads, and the pariah psychiatric patients, and the bottomless-pits of money wasted on projects.

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