Archive News
Geoffrey’s mission to ensure fair deal for kids
Date Published: {J}
As a child, Geoffrey Shannon had a real sense that life was terribly unfair for some children.
Living opposite St Joseph’s Industrial School in Salthill, his mother would bake buns for the boys there. The family of five used to foster some of the kids for a period.
Although he has no recollection of hearing directly about the horrors that went on in the institution, it left an indelible stamp on his consciousness.
“I have a vivid memory of them [the children]. I remember some of the names of the children that stayed with us. I remember thinking how privileged I was to have a family and was aware of some sort of social injustice – that these children can’t enjoy the same by reason of circumstance. Even at that age you reflect on why this happened,” he recalls.
The sense of social injustice and a compulsion to do something about it was to fuel his path in life.
At school in the Jes, he remembers being involved in debates in which he would argue on behalf of the disadvantaged.
At home his father Eddie was a teacher at Moneeageisha community secondary school, his mother Ailish was with the Board of Works (now the OPW) He always wanted to study law. He was known as the one in the family who would always question.
“From the start I wanted to specialise in child law and I did that fairly quickly at UCG. I did a lot of research about foster care for my undergraduate thesis. I trained as a solicitor in Limerick and then did a masters by night, focusing on adoption and child protection,” he explains.
“The whole area was really unknown at the time. I was a couple of years ahead of other people so when these issues hit Ireland I was on top of the research. The stuff I was doing was fairly groundbreaking, the type of issues that emerged in the Murphy and Ryan Reports.
“The type of abusive behaviour that came out in these reports was no great surprise to me – I was surprised that other people were surprised because a lot of people knew the harsh approach taken in these homes.”
Geoffrey’s research led him to work with social workers in Galway in the foster care system. What stood out was that the foster carers and the children they provided a home for had absolutely no rights.
While the theory of the law led him to conclude that the legislation was hugely inadequate for children, it was the experience of it that propelled him down the road of reform.
“I remember a birth mother who had three partners and 18 addresses over the course of two years. I was acting on behalf of the foster carer and the natural mother was attempting to claim the child back.
“You saw immediately the problem from a child’s perspective, how destabilising that situation was for a child, how the child was then placed with the foster parents in a very safe and secure environment. You saw how the law needed to accommodate the child but wasn’t able to – in law the child was invisible.”
As a result of his work in the area of adoption, he was retained by the Department of Health and Children as an independent legal expert to facilitate a wide-ranging consultation process on future developments in adoption legislation.
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
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