Archive News
Johnny helps bring it all back home
Date Published: 05-Jul-2012
The West of Ireland man who has travelled the world to co-ordinate the programme of events at each of the ten stopover ports for the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) has admitted that the homecoming at Galway Harbour in the early hours of Tuesday morning had astonished everyone associated with world sailing’s biggest event.
Ironically, drummer Johnny Donnelly left The Saw Doctors in 2001 because he was tired of all the travelling. When the boats sailed into Galway on Tuesday, it was the beginning of the end of an amazing adventure in which he has organised VOR festivals in Spain, South Africa, Abu Dhabi, China, New Zealand, Brazil, the USA, Portugal, and France.
The father of four young children admitted that it was not easy to spend so much of the last nine months on the road, but he had a genuine thrill when at least 20,000 people turned out to welcome the six competing boats to his home city at 2.30am.
All year, people in boardrooms as far apart as Sanya (China) and Itajai (Brazil) marvelled at the success of the 2009 Galway stopover – and everyone associated with the event was overwhelmed when the most exciting finish in the race’s history ended with such a rousing reception from the huge crowds around the harbour.
“On Monday night, all I could think was ‘thank God I’m from Galway’,” Donnelly told the Galway City Tribune this week. “I have seen the reactions of the spectators at all the other ports when the boats were coming in and none of them were like the reception the crews received on Monday night. I have never experienced anything like that.
“I think it is just being Irish and being from Galway. It’s a sense of pride and also a big ‘Thank You’ to the VOR for having faith in Galway and bringing the event to our small city. It’s like the Irish soccer fans singing when the team is being beaten. That’s the power of being Irish!”
Donnelly, who lives in Headford, had run between 60 and 70 marathons across the globe for charity between 2008 and last year after his youngest son, Harry, took ill. Then he landed the job of co-ordinating all of the Volvo stopovers and had to visit all of the ports for preparatory work before the race even began. Effectively, he has been on the road for four years, so it’s a good job he has such an understanding wife at home in Headford!
“It was an amazing feeling on Sunday night, coming back to Galway and knowing that the travelling had come to an end. The marathons happened because Harry, the youngest child, was very sick. For me it was just constant travelling from 2008 until the start of the race last October,” he said.
“It’s funny. I left The Saw Doctors because I did not want to travel. For the last year I’ve been doing even more travelling than I ever did with them, without having the highs and lows of being on stage. But it has been unbelievable, a real learning experience for me.”
Donnelly, whose events management company is called Arcana, had previously worked on the 2008-9 VOR, running the Tourism Ireland entertainment programme at six of the nine stopover cities. He admits to having little interest in sailing – and he has never even been on one of the competing boats.
But he jumped at the chance of taking on a job which has huge responsibility when approached by the Volvo organisers, who had been impressed by the huge success of the 2009 stopover in Galway.
Johnny was the man who co-ordinated the arrival of the boats into the docks early on Tuesday morning, the full programme of entertainment, and he has had to liaise with the crews on a constant basis since last October. As a marathon runner, he can relate to their dedication and the hardship they have endured in sailing 39,000 miles across the globe.
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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