Archive News
Meditation helps Claire emerge from a dark place
Date Published: 10-Jan-2013
I know so many people who are suffering and suicidal,” says Claire Gormley who hopes that sharing her amazing life’s journey from attempted suicide to a place of peace will help others who are in pain.
Despite her protestation that she isn’t a writer she has penned an engaging and wise debut publication.
The Divine Spark: A Miracle of Human Transformation is both a personal story and a collection of knowledge and wisdom drawn from a wide range of sources.
“I wanted to have it so that it would be simple to read, especially because of people’s attention span these days,” she explains, adding that “when I was back there suffering, I couldn’t read very heavy texts”.
Meeting the softly spoken Claire now it’s difficult to believe that she spent a good portion of her youth drinking and taking drugs. Or that, after a suicide attempt, she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital, where electric shock treatment was given to her when medication had failed.
It’s only when she says in passing that the aggressive electric shock treatment has had an impact on her short-term memory that you realise the enormity of what she has gone through.
Being depressed was like being “shrouded in negativity and lack of hope”, she says now. “It’s like a darkness – you are consumed by negative thinking and trapped in some sort of heavy state. Mostly it’s lack of hope and living in a meaningless world with very little drive or optimism.”
It’s difficult to know what causes depression, she adds. “Some people are prone to melancholy by nature, but a lot of the way we are is conditioned by our upbringing.”
Claire was born in England to parents from the West of Ireland, each of whom had endured a difficult childhood. Not surprisingly the dysfunction and pain continued through to the next generation.
They returned to Ireland in 1973 when Claire was four and bought a pub in Athenry, where they had a thriving business. But it was at the expense of family life. That fact, combined with a violent teacher at school, and later on, abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest had a profound effect on Claire.
Her descriptions of her childhood in the book are far from melodramatic and she is not in the blame game, but the confusion and pain she felt as a lonely youngster are vividly and painfully evoked.
She did the Leaving Cert at 16 and then spent a year in Paris before returning to college to study art and design. But she was carrying deep unhappiness and distress. One night, following a heavy drinking session and a row with a friend, she attempted suicide. She ended up in hospital, but as she says “nothing could shift the pain”. Not talking, nor medication. That was when she was given three sessions a week of electric shock therapy. She knew enough to pretend it was working in order to stop it.
Still, Claire was drawn back to a crazy lifestyle, fuelled by drink and drugs. She went to America to escape it, and didn’t. That was a period of life when she lost several friends because of their lifestyle. There were also good times, when she worked for wealthy people and while she enjoyed that experience, she realised that despite being rich, many of these people were not happy.
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
images/files/images/x3_Courthouse.jpg
Families queue up for school’s offer of free house
West has lower cancer survival rates than rest
Galway minors continue to lay waste to all opponents
Gardaí and IFA issue a joint appeal on summer road safety
Marathon Man plans to call a halt – but not before he hits 160 races
