Archive News
MickÕs debut novel of crime and love finally sees the light of day
Date Published: {J}
The painful process of bringing his first novel to life hasn’t scared Mick Donnellan away from the world of fiction and theatre.
He’s quietly spoken, but focused and it’s easy see how in the space of over a year, he set up his own theatre company and produced three self-penned plays. In the middle of all that, he was also preparing to launch his novel.
Ballinrobe born Mick, who now lives in Galway, wrote El Niño, a crime novel and love story, almost seven years ago, after completing an MA in creative writing at NUIG.
He got a Dublin agent in 2005, who felt that it was only a matter of time before it was published, as there was a considerable appetite back then for crime fiction.
Mick went travelling and waited for the call.
“But then I was told that the fiction market wasn’t happening anymore.”
After coming home in 2010, he focused on writing plays while the unpublished novel languished on the shelf. Eventually he decided if it were ever to be published, he’d have to do himself.
“I was expecting it to work for so long and I celebrated it in advance, only to be let down.”
El Niño is now seeing the light of day in conjunction with a Dublin company called Original Writing, which specialises in self-publishing.
Original Writing shares the work and costs of getting book out and then author and company will agree on a percentage of the returns.
“It works well for me because I already have a platform,” says Mick, referring to the Truman Town Theatre, which has helped to raise his profile.
Mick set up Truman Town Theatre early last year to stage his first play, Sunday Morning Coming Down.
This play had previously caught the eye of the Druid Theatre Company, which commissioned a public reading of the piece in 2009 as part of its scheme to encourage new writing.
Ultimately Druid decided not to give it a full-length production, so Mick took decisive action and set up his own company for that purpose.
The theatre company is named after the 1998 film, The Truman Show, as a sort of a jokey reference to his own life, he explains.
After college, Mick had travelled extensively and kept a blog, where he referred to Ballinrobe as Truman Town, because when he and his friends came home for periods, they found it impossible to get away again.
Truman Town Theatre first staged Sunday Morning Coming Down in the city’s Town Hall Studio theatre early last year.
It sold out in advance and people went wild for it, he says. The company subsequently staged it in Cong, Co Mayo, before returning to the main stage in the Town Hall, continuing on to venues in Clare, Castlebar and Dublin.
Since then they have staged two other plays by Mick, Gunmetal Grey and Shortcut to Hallelujah and are now just back from Kerry where they were performing his new work, The Velvet Revolution. That will shortly be staged in the city’s Town Hall Studio space. Then there are plans to bring Gunmetal Grey to the main stage, and Truman are also gearing up for an Arts Festival production.
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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