Archive News
Loughnane sets her sights on top eight finish
Date Published: 26-Jul-2012
CIARAN TIERNEY
HER experience of finishing in seventh place at the Beijing Olympics and subsequent silver medal at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin have established walker Olive Loughnane as one of the genuine medal contenders on the Irish team for the London Games.
Only one other member of Team Ireland, fellow walker Robert Heffernan (Cork AC), is set to match her achievement of appearing in four consecutive Olympic Games when the athletics events begin in earnest next week.
Loughrea native Loughnane, who has lived in Cork for some years, was one of the few Irish athletes to emerge from Beijing with a truly creditable performance four years ago.
She beat her own personal best time in the 20km walk – and her old Irish record by 90 seconds – thanks to a storming finish in which she moved up the field from 13th to seventh position, in heavy rain.
Two years later, there was even more joy for the Loughrea woman when she finished 49 seconds behind defending champion and Olympic gold medallist Olga Kaniskina (Russia), who won the World Championships final in a time of one hour, 28 minutes, and nine seconds.
Loughnane’s own personal best time is 1.27.45 and, like fellow Galwegian Paul Hession, she has had over a year to concentrate on London 2012 since achieving the qualifying time for the Olympics in Dublin in June of last year.
Now 36, Loughnane has a brilliant record in major championships and is relishing the prospect of competing in London after already representing her country at the Sydney, Athens, and Beijing Games.
Her seventh place in Beijing was her best performance at the Olympic Games, as Olive finished 35th at Sydney in 2000 and failed to finish in Athens in 2004. Her silver at the World Championships was the highlight of her career.
The Athens final was the first time in her career in which she failed to complete a walk in a major championship. She had been feeling unwell the night before the race and dropped out, in some distress, just past the 12km mark. Olive made up for the frustrations of that race with her superb performance in Beijing four years later.
The 20km walk is a notoriously unpredictable event, as conditions and courses can vary considerably from one event to another, but Loughnane should clearly relish the fact that conditions in London will not be a million miles away from what she’s used to on the streets of Cork throughout the year.
Her chosen sport is an extremely technical discipline, which rewards endurance and technique. Athletes from Russia have tended to dominate the event, in which competitors must have a foot on the ground at all times, in recent years.
Loughnane joined Loughrea Athletic Club as a youngster and was a leading cross-country runner in her teens. Coaches Mary Barrett and Martin Collins introduced her to the sport of walking at the age of 19, and she soon found that she had a natural ability for the event.
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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