Archive News
It takes more than just Blarney and a smile
Date Published: {J}
Perhaps the best indicator of just how cut-throat the competition has become for international jobs investment was a recent mention in Time magazine of the transfer of work which is now taking place in Asia.
While we have had a growing impression here of just how competitive the jobs market place has become between the Western economies and those such as China and India, the Time story brought the ‘trade’ just one more hugely important step.
For it revealed that the Chinese – long one of the most feared competitors on the world market for foreign direct investment – are already outsourcing certain work to Malaysia, where it can be done more cheaply and then sent back to China.
It is a salutary piece of information in view of the closure of the TalkTalk call centre and customer service centre in Waterford with the loss of close on 600 jobs, not to mention downstream implications for goodness knows how many other jobs in services and shops and the like, which were dependant on the TalkTalk jobs.
One can presume that the newspaper figures are in the correct ‘ballpark’ when they say it would be cheaper by as much as €80 per worker per day to do the work of TalkTalk in India, China or a number of other countries where wages are dramatically lower.
The stories of how much cheaper it is elsewhere to do things, proliferate . . . China has become a world force in industry built on consumer products built cheaply in a low-waged economy, which has the added advantage of an undervalued currency which makes her a fearsome competitor on world markets.
And the sheer scale of her workforce and the scale of her industrial development is the stuff of legend – word is that in one case of an Irish industry that was moved lock stock and barrel to China, the workers losing their jobs could not find on the map the city to which the jobs were going, despite the fact that the Chinese city had more than four million inhabitants.
The stories are legend of the scale of development in China . . . of one industrial estate which is 18 miles long. Some of them may be apocryphal, but they serve to illustrate the kind of new superpower which has arrived and which is competing on world markets for the investment dollar.
It’s a far cry from the days in the early 1990s when Digital was closing its hardware section in Galway and the battle then was between Galway and a centre in Scotland, which is not to say that the battle was any less intense, nor the propaganda from Scotland any less hard hitting than we might get from China.
So, a bit of Blarney and a smile, which can never go amiss, will not be enough to keep us to the fore in chasing the vitally important foreign direct investment . . . for it now seems clear that recovery will not come from the domestic market, but from export-led figures which, hopefully, will eventually bring our economy around from its present parlous state.
The reason we are among the world leaders in areas such as software, medical products and pharmaceuticals is that we are among the best in the world in the area, that we can meet the most exacting standards in quality control, and our young people are damn good in the area.
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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