Archive News
Matt the Hat says literary festival ‘write’ up his street
Date Published: 19-Apr-2012
Mattie Hynes looks distinctive probably because he almost always wears a black hat, and anyone who didn’t know him would incorrectly guess that he is an actor.
It’s an honest mistake for people to make in this the culture capital of Ireland and while Mattie isn’t a regular on the stage, he is very familiar with the back stage areas at various art events as a sound technician and hospitality workers for Cúirt.
Next week will be his 17th year working with Cúirt, the annual international festival of literature which Mattie declares is his favourite week of the year. It is when he meets and greets some of the biggest names in literature today, some of them politicians and often controversial figures.
But Mattie says he is equally looking forward to meeting the regular patrons to the festival, some of whom he had got to know from meeting them year after year. Next week, the foyers and bars of various hotels around the city will be locations for reunions of old friends. There’s one group of teachers who travel from Switzerland to Cúirt every second year, he says.
“They love the intimacy of the festival and that unlike other literary festivals, they can meet the writers and poets afterwards. . . and of course they enjoy the atmosphere of the week, the music and the friendliness,” he says.
Mattie doesn’t mind that he works in the background of Cúirt, but he was a bit shy of doing the interview because he doesn’t like being in the limelight. And yet, mention Matt the Hat to any local person and they immediately know who you are talking about, which makes Mattie an iconic figure in his own home town.
Mattie is from Rahoon, where his 93 years old mother, Margaret, still lives and where she continues to bake her popular porter cakes!
After finishing his education in the Bish, he went to work in O’Connor’s TV repair shop, which used to be located in Sickeen, Woodquay before it moved to Middle Street. He was a field engineer which involved travelling the highways and byways (“mostly boreens” says Mattie) of the county fixing televisions. Ah, those were the days when the TV repair man was God!
“It was also the days before mobile phones and after I would finish a few jobs, say in Gort, I would look for a public phone box with the wind up phone and ring the office to see if there were any more calls I had to make in the area before heading home,” Mattie recalls.
He remembers being aged only nine years when he got backstage in St Patrick’s School after seeing the play, Shadow of a Gunman, in which a relation was taking part. Little did he know that this area of the auditorium was to be his future workplace.
“We always went to plays, amateur productions but I never took part in them. . . I don’t know why. Funny enough my first acting experience came many years later when I played a mobster in Mobs i Meiricea, a six part series for TG4, but that was it.”
He says he has always been associated with the arts in one way or another so it is hard to put a time on it, but he claims Macnas had something to do with it!
“I worked on about 10 to 12 Macnas parades for the Galway Arts Festival doing various jobs and for much of that time I was still working for O’Connor’s. But next week will be my 17th Cúirt where I mostly do hospitality – the green room. And what happens in the green room stays in the green room!” he says with a twinkle in his eye before there’s any question put to him about celebrity guests at the festival.
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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