Archive News
John steers Community Games into a new era
Date Published: {J}
For a small population base relative to the country as a whole, Galway has regularly punched above its weight in terms of sports administration on this island.
Billy Glynn, for example, is the present Senior Vice-President of the IRFU, which means he will automatically become President in May or June of this year, the seventh Galwegians RFC member to hold that particular honour.
Just over a decade ago, it was Joe McDonagh who – as President of the GAA – set in motion the removal of the ban on security forces, all football games to be played in one calendar year, and a minimum of two championship games for every inter-county team.
Going further back in time, Henry St John Blake (known as Harry Blake) served four terms as President of the Irish Lawn Tennis Association, as well as being heavily involved with the Irish Amateur Swimming Association.
Now another Galway man is in a top post in the sporting world, with John Byrne having begun life this week as Chief Executive Officer of the Community Games.
The Henry Street native, who is also a member of the Irish Sports Council, is well-known in sporting circles, particularly in relation to soccer – he worked as Planning and Development Manager with the FAI for 10 years, a role that only ended late last year when the position was one of many made redundant by the association as a result of cutbacks.
John was the middle of 11 children – six boys and five girls – born to Michael and Lily Byrne of Henry Street, two people who were steeped in sport. Michael – who worked as a Housing Assistance Officer with Galway County Council – was secretary of both the Galway FA and the Connacht FA for many years, and the annual Michael Byrne Cup is named after him.
Lily was one of the O’Connors from Bohermore and she came from a GAA background – her father was a substitute on the 1923 Galway side that claimed the county’s first All-Ireland hurling title, and trained the Castlegar team that won five consecutive county titles from 1936.
John played soccer with Galway Bohs and West United, as well as Gaelic football with Fr Griffins and Western Stars in the City League, but he readily admits that soccer was always his first love.
He attended St Patrick’s National School, making the natural progression to the Bish for his secondary schooling, and he is quick to point to the massive role played by the Patrician Brothers to the education of tens of thousands of boys in the city since they first began teaching in the city in 1827.
The school on Lombard Street came to be the largest National School in Ireland, and during the Famine provided a free breakfast for up to 1,000 pupils each day, as well as distributing clothing.
“Half of Galway would have been educated by the Patrician Brothers down through the years, and I think it is a shame that their role in this city has never been really acknowledged or appreciated,” he says.
One of the lasting friendships he formed was with Br Justin Madden, who is now living in Mountrath in Laois, and their friendship extended beyond the school walls.
“He was in charge of the soccer team in St Pats, and he had some great players, fellas like Kieran Joyce, Ray Flaherty and Jimmy Laffey, but he didn’t know how to keep them together and develop a really strong team.
“He was talking to my father about it one day, and Dad said to him ‘just form a club yourself’, so we sat down together and established Corrib Shamrocks in 1973, and two years later that team of Laffey, Joyce and Flaherty won the U-13 Connacht Cup, ” he recalls.
“When I went to the Bish, Eugene Dunleavy asked myself and Eamon Brennan (brother of the late TD and Minister, Seamus Brennan) to look after the First Year team. At the time there was no primary school competition, so we used to play St Pats, and they beat us two years on the trot,” he says.
In the same year as helping to form Corrib Shamrocks, John was also a central figure in setting up the Galway Junior Soccer Committee along with the likes of Br Justin, Joe Keating, Mike Killeen, Frank O’Connell, Mike O’Connor and Bernard Shapiro, who was helping to form Renmore AFC at the same time.
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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