Archive News
Millions to one: brave Rory defies huge odds
Date Published: 26-Jul-2012
Rory Barrett might not have had the best start in life – the youngster who was born without kidneys was recently described by a specialist in London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital as being “not one in a million, but one in several million”.
Yet Rory, who will celebrate his ninth birthday next month, is a lively, lovely boy. He isn’t into small talk but is the class clown in the city’s Scoil Iognáid, where he attends primary school. He also won the Gaeilgeoir na Seachtaine award in class recently, despite his parents having been told by ‘an expert’ some years ago that he had an IQ of less than 70.
Fair enough, Rory didn’t have the best beginning in life. But he has been lucky in having parents who mightn’t fancy being described as amazing – but who are.
Today, Rory, whose very survival is nothing short of a miracle, has a functioning kidney, which was donated to him in November 2007 by his father, Niall.
However, there are still hurdles to overcome and there’s no better woman to have in your corner for the ongoing battles than his mother, Ann Brehony.
“Absence of choice is a great thing,” she says with a laugh over tea in the kitchen of her home in Fr Griffin Road. Ann has made countless pots of tea in this room in the past eight years, where she has met with health service professionals to discuss Rory’s needs, or availed of friends’ listening ears when the going got tough.
Rory is their second child; the couple also have a daughter, 11-year-old Jess who is “fantastic”, according to her mother.
He initially had kidneys while he was in the womb, but after 20 weeks, they clotted off and nobody knows why, Ann explains. She and Niall knew something was up after about 30 weeks, “because I had no fluid”.
After he was born, batteries of tests were carried out on the infant, but all were inconclusive.
Initially, he was in the Intensive Care Unit in Crumlin and then they started on dialysis at home in Galway, which worked for about a year, with regular visits to Crumlin. Because there was no dedicated renal ward there at the time “he got every infection going”.
At the end of his first year on dialysis Rory got peritonitis and from that septicaemia, which meant an end to home dialysis.
From then on, he and his parents made three trips a week to Temple Street Children’s Hospital, rising at about 4.15 to get the ‘red-eye’ flight from Galway airport. Soon the pilots and airline staff knew them and Rory, who is a character, was a mini-celebrity on the flight.
“In a funny way, going to Dublin was easier, because it wasn’t as isolating as being at home,” Ann says. Still, it was tough, especially as they wanted to ensure their toddler daughter, Jess didn’t miss out on her childhood.
“I used to count hours of sleep like other people used to count calories.”
And there were many scares. In his early years, they had to rush Rory to hospital in Dublin several times in the middle of the night, and there were fears he wouldn’t survive. But he has defied the odds and continues to do so.
“We are lucky in the battles we have had that both of us have been able for them. Also, we both worked in production and that’s an advantage, because you need to have a schedule,” says Ann, who in a previous life worked in the film industry as a production manager.
Niall, meanwhile, works with the Saw doctors, which involves a lot of travelling, so organisation is vital.
Ann has written an amazingly honest blog about Rory’s life, his milestones and difficulties and achievements, which was nominated for an Irish Blog award in 2010.
She takes the reader on an amazing journey – one of optimism, courage, hope, anger, humour, exhaustion, and love, in her battle to ensure that Rory can live up to his potential and that any other child, who is born with the same condition, will not face the same difficulties he did.
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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