Political World
Memories of clangers and canvass at the Galway Races
I have been over a quarter of a century working as a journalist and have written many thousands of articles. These days I come across stuff I wrote a decade or even two decades ago and I can’t remember – and then there are stories you never forget.
The first category is big ones on which your reputation, for what it is, is built. I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list of all my gaiscí (there are so many!). Lately I was clearing out the attic of my old house and came across an article from 1994. It was an interview with the INLA member, and notorious paramilitary, Dominic McGlinchey, only ten days before he was gunned down in Drogheda. Every sentence of that has been seared into my memory.
Then there are the very unusual ones, more often than not they involve travel to an exotic foreign destinations.
Or a dangerous one; including trips I made to conflict zones when I was young and single and did not care all that much about the consequences.
The third category comprises the stuff you want to forget but never can. They include clangers and disasters – from a silly embarrassing typographical error to a huge defamation that will cost you sleepless nights and might ruin your reputation.
I’ve been threatened with libel actions a few times but have never been successfully sued. When the legal letter comes in it has the same effect on your body as a needle piercing a balloon. It’s awful.
Thankfully, the legal actions that were threatened withered on the vine. It’s more to do with me being ultra-cautious and risk averse rather than adopting a ‘publish and be damned’ attitude.
Don’t get me wrong. Nowadays, we journalists are processing so much copy each week that it makes it more difficult to be correct. The human hard-disk is always vulnerable to viruses. One virus is fallibility. Another is the journalist making a hopelessly wrong assumption that goes straight into the article, unthinkingly.
In that category falls the stuff that is not serious but merely embarrassing.
One early example is topical and prescient as it provides the trigger for the argument I’m making in the rest of the article.
Very early on in my career in The Connacht Tribune, I was asked to write the main story for the city edition about the Galway Races that was starting the following week.
Obviously it was late July, the slowest time of year for news stories. The piece would be a speculative piece, guessing how much that year’s race would be worth to the city.
It involved getting an estimate on attendance and the possible tote takings. Then you multiplied that number by two or three to get the figure for non-tote betting and off-course betting.
Then you estimated how many hotel and guest rooms there were in the city and guessed the average charge.
Then you threw in the copious amounts of money that might be spent on drink and gambling and food and shopping and this, that and the other.
And then you came up with a figure.
My mistake wasn’t the figure. I was young and had done all my phone calls dutifully and had come up with a figure that was big enough to satisfy the editor.
My mistake was a typographical one. The intro was supposed to read. “Galway is set to benefit from a record £13 million splurge during next week’s Race Week, predicted to be the biggest in its history.”
Newspapers never spare the superlatives. My mistake was I somehow managed to leave the ‘million’ word out in the first sentence and in every subsequent sentence. So the net result was the biggest race meeting in memory would benefit the city to the tune of £13.
Cue red-faced embarrassment. It was just awful. The slag from my colleagues in the newsroom on Market Street was intolerable.
For more of Harry’s tales of the Galway Races see this week’s Tribune here
World of Politics with Harry McGee
Academically, politics is described as a science. But in the real world, it’s more of an art – and one of the big decisions a Government has to make is to decide when to call an election.
Will they see out the full term, or will they go early – either to mitigate the damage they will ship, or to secure a victory before things go awry, or the economy takes a dip, or some kind of controversy erupts?
Timing is everything.
And there’s a bit of art to that – not to mention a lot of luck. If you call it early and win big, you’re a genius. If you call it early and lose, you are the political version of the village fool.
Charlie Haughey was a poor judge of the public mood. Twice he called snap elections and on both occasions they backfired. Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in late 1979 and did not – technically – have his own mandate. He tried to remedy that by calling an election in 1981. But it recoiled. Ray MacSharry warned him not to hold it during the H Block hunger strikes when republican prisoners were dying each day. He did not listen to the advice and found himself out of office.
After his return to power in 1987, Haughey tired of presiding over a minority government that kept on losing votes in the Oireachtas (the opposition won nine private members motions).
So he called a snap general election and it backfired. Fianna Fáil lost seats and had to broker a coalition deal with the Progressive Democrats and his long-standing political adversary Dessie O’Malley.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
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World of Politics with Harry McGee
I was cycling down Mount Street in Dublin on Tuesday. It’s a wide esplanade that links the Grand Canal with Merrion Square. The street is a mixture of fine Georgian buildings and modern office blocks.
About half-way down is the office of the International Protection Office, which deals with asylum seekers who have arrived in the country.
Needless to say, the office has been overwhelmed in the past year. Besides an estimated 80,000 refugees who have arrived from Ukraine, there have been about 20,000 people from other parts of the world who have arrived into Dublin (mostly) claiming asylum.
The numbers peaked around Christmas, but they have been falling a little. In January, more than 1,300 people arrived seeking asylum but the numbers fell back to 831 and 858, in February and March respectively.
They are still huge numbers in a historical context.
So back to my cycle on Tuesday. I knew that some asylum seekers were camping outside the International Protection Office, but I was taken aback by how many. There were six tents lined up on the pavement directly outside. Then on the ramp that led down to the basement carpark on the side of the building, there were about another 20 tents.
It looked like what it was, a refugee camp in the middle of Dublin’s business district. If you pan out from Mount Street, you will find tents here and there in nearby streets and alleys. There were a good few tents in an alleyway off Sandwith Street about 500 metres away.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
God that was a dramatic and historic weekend in England, wasn’t it? So much excitement, so much change, so much hype, so much out with the old and in with the new, and what looks like the coronation of a new leader. Yes, the local elections in Britain were something else weren’t they!
Apologies for not going on about King Charles III but the contract I signed when I became a lifelong republican forbids me to discuss the topic!
I know the British local elections sound a bit boring by comparison, but the results were stunning.
The Conservatives lost nearly 1,000 seats, the British Labour Party gained almost 500 and both the Lib Dems (with 350 gains) and the Greens (gaining over 200) also had amazing days at the polls.
It was Labour’s best day since 2002 but its victory was only partial. The Greens and the Lib Dems actually made gains at the expense of Labour in more affluent areas, and in parts of Britain where there were high numbers of graduates.
It was in the Red Wall constituencies in the North of England where the Labour recovery was strongest. These are working class constituencies with pockets of deprivation where people voted for the Labour Party forever. But all of those constituencies voted for Brexit and then voted for the Tories in the next general election. Labour is now winning back some of those votes.
Local elections are classified as second-tier elections which essentially means – from a national perspective – they are not life-or-death affairs, and not everything turns on them. Of course, it’s really important to have good local representation. But they are not an amazing weather vane for who rules the country.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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