Archive News
Liam hits right note as Galway Town Crier
Date Published: {J}
Have bell, will travel’, is an unusual motto but one that applies to Liam Silke, who is the city’s Town Crier, albeit an unofficial one.
‘Oyez, oyez, Hear ye, hear ye,’ is the loud refrain delivered regularly by Liam, who has the strong voice for it, as he leads parades or enters a room to announce a newly married couple or the start of an event.
Liam first spotted the old Town Crier’s bell in Dillon’s Claddagh Museum. It gave him the idea to reinstate the position and make himself available for appropriate events.
The last Town Crier the city had was Ned Joyce, who died in 1979, so it was timely for Liam to take over the role, when he returned from Dublin to his native city in the early 1990s.
Liam approached it with gusto, acquiring the costume, complete with triton hat, and buying his own bell. The original bell remains in Dillon’s Museum.
The Town Crier role fits in well with his forays into the world of theatre, though his acting was through the Murder Mystery weekends he ran with his friend, the late Brian Walsh.
Liam adopts the role of Town Crier for corporate events and festivals, but would love if it was recognised by the local authority, so that his services would be used for promotional purposes.
Taking on the role in Galway wasn’t his first brush with being Town Crier – he invented one for the Dalkey Festival many years ago as a fundraiser. At the time he operated a restaurant in the Dublin village.
Originally from the West in Galway city, Liam came from a big family who owned the Marian Cafe in William Street, where he waited tables after school. This gave him a taste of his future career in the hospitality and catering business.
Liam has run his own restaurant, he worked for a number of years in the PV Doyle hotel group, he returned to college and used his life experiences to lecture hotel and catering students.
Now, having returned to his roots, he lives in Munster Avenue, where he is very involved with Age Action. At 71, he hates ageism and believes that as long as people are fit and able, there are no limitations to what they can do.
“I promote Age Action as best as I can when I can,” he says.
Five years ago he became a qualified Fáilte Ireland tour guide and does walking tours of the city, which he loves. Again, it’s something he does with gusto.
In his youth he left UCG because he couldn’t get into his chosen course. “I enjoyed the good life too much, the rugby, the craic . . . and the Arts course was in Irish,” he laughs.
“You have to travel the world to find out where your home is. I would have stayed in Galway, grey as it was in the 50s but as soon as I got an opportunity I was gone.
Aged 19, he went to the Shannon Hotel training college where he discovered his niche. From there he was sent to Switzerland and Sweden as an exchange student. His first job was in England, where he spent ten years.
He had met his wife Niamh, a Dubliner, in Shannon and they settled in Dalkey where they reared three children and opened one of the village’s first restaurants, in 1974. For ten years previously, Liam had worked in the Burlington and then the Green Isle Hotel, both in the Doyle group.
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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