Archive News
Living with never-ending pain of a child’s death
Date Published: {J}
Some days are easier than others for Siobhan Carroll, but there is never an easy day. Sometimes she can roll out of bed without too much thought, other times it takes a couple of deep breaths before that first step of the day can be taken, and that is often how she and her husband Noel get through the day – one step at a time.
The date of April 2, 2008 saw Siobhan and Noel’s lives turned completely upside down when the ultimate horror for a parent visited them – the death of a child.
Their eldest child, Aoibhe – who had turned four in January – woke up in the middle of the night of April 1 with vomiting and diarrhoea. Noel was at home alone with Aoibhe and her brother Eimhin (2), as Siobhan, who was pregnant with their third child, was experiencing some difficulties related to her pregnancy and so was in hospital for overnight observation.
Noel comforted Aoibhe, changed her and when she fell asleep again, tucked her back up in bed, and rang Siobhan in the hospital to let her know Aoibhe had been sick.
“I didn’t expect a thing, sure how could you? Yes, I was worried that one of the kids was sick, but kids get sick all the time. I had spoken to her on the phone earlier in the evening before she went to bed and she was in great form, so I wasn’t overly worried,” Siobhan recalls.
However, Aoibhe got sick again later in the night, setting off alarm bells with Noel, and he called the doctor, who told him it sounded like Aoibhe had a vomiting bug.
As her condition deteriorated during the night, he rang the doctor a couple of time times and followed the advice given. At this stage Noel was sitting on the couch in the sitting room of their Oranmore house in the early hours of the morning, cradling Aoibhe in his arms.
They were watching cartoons around 5am when Aoibhe’s eyes closed and Noel thought she was drifting off to sleep, but he then noticed her lips had started to turn blue. He immediately rang an ambulance, and phoned Siobhan to tell her Aoibhe was not well and there was an ambulance coming out.
“I was obviously very worried then, and I spoke to Noel when the ambulance arrived and he told me ‘they’re working on her’ and I didn’t know what he meant, ‘working on her’, sure she only had a vomiting bug.”
What Siobhan didn’t know was that by the time the ambulance arrived to the house, Aoibhe had stopped breathing. The ambulance crew worked furiously on the little girl, and managed to revive her, and she was rushed into hospital.
“I was being kept in for the night for observation, so when Noel told me she was on the way in to the hospital in an ambulance, I made my way over to A&E to wait for them. I remember standing outside in the dark, it was the middle of the night so it was very quiet, and off in the distance I could hear a siren and do you know what I said, I said to myself ‘God, it sounds as if someone is very sick, God love them’ without realising it was the ambulance rushing my Aoibhe into hospital.
“The ambulance pulled up, the doors opened and someone just ran out, straight past me, and into A&E, followed by the ambulance crew and Noel with Aoibhe. Aoibhe died within an hour, an aggressive strain of meningitis taking her life,” she says in hushed tones, her voice trailing off.
At the start of the interview, Siobhan hands me a printed page with details of what happened that night, with the explanation that she can’t bring herself to talk about the horror that visited her and her family, but over the two hours we spend talking, she dips further and further into some hidden well of courage to give voice to that earth-shattering early morning.
“I was in hospital so I never got to hold her, I never got to say goodbye to her, and that’s very hard to take, she was gone, just like that.
“We were great friends, great buddies, and I’m thankful for the fact that I didn’t go back to work after she was born, so I had that precious time with her, but God, I miss her so much, it’s still hard to believe she’s gone.
“She was a great little character – we’d go shopping together, and when we’d be on the way home we’d hatch a plan that I would go in and distract Daddy so she could run upstairs and hide the bags of things we had bought in the wardrobe.
“She was really looking forward to starting school – she was in the naíonra and was loving it there, and she just couldn’t wait to start in ‘big school’, as she’d say,” Siobhan explains.
For more, read this week’s Connacht 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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