Archive News
Natural health guru a walking advertisement for good living
Date Published: {J}
It’s one of those happy coincidences that a man promoting the benefits of natural health should be blessed with the name Plant.
And if ever anybody was an advertisement for the lifestyle he promotes it’s 83-year-old Ronnie Plant, who has just driven from Wexford to Galway for this interview, and is looking forward to climbing Croagh Patrick in two weeks’ time, a climb he undertakes annually.
In between practising naturopathy and climbing mountains, Ronnie writes books. His first, Health is Wealth – A to Z Encyclopaedia of Natural Remedies and Good Food, was written seven years’ ago. His latest, Selling Sickness, which is an attack on many of the practices of modern medicine, has just been released.
Selling Sickness is a hard-hitting work, in which he claims that many illnesses that plague modern society such as Type 2 Diabetes, cholesterol and high blood pressure, are not actually illnesses and can be treated naturally, without the need for lifelong dependency on chemical drugs.
“My contention is that we are going down the wrong road, with too many people today thinking we have a pill for all ailments,” says the sprightly, lean Ronnie, whose only ailment is deafness in his left ear, a legacy of years spent in construction of London’s underground and the Channel Tunnel.
Ronnie maintains that the Irish health service has been “developed, cultivated and turned into a ‘sickness industry’, the largest and worst run industry in the country.
“Our Health Service employs over 105,000 personnel, costing the taxpayer up to €14 billion annually. Fourteen years ago, the service cost a little over three billion, a figure considered astronomical at that time.”
Wexford born Ronnie, an athlete in his youth, is quick to admit that for many years, his lifestyle wasn’t healthy. In fact, it was almost 50 years ago, while living and working in Galway, that he mended his ways, after a health scare.
“I worked in Galway in the early 1960s when the company Cold Chon (which makes bitumen emulsion for roads and is based in Oranmore) was just setting up. I was Works Manager and one of the mottos we had was ‘if you are sending out bitumen to County Councils, whatever you do, don’t have them waiting for it’.
So, to ensure that nobody was waiting, he’d be up at 4am or 5am every day, but wouldn’t eat breakfast until 10am, when he’d enjoy the ‘full Irish’. He was also smoking at the time and would regularly call to Paddy Burke’s in Clarinbridge for a few pints every evening before going home for dinner.
“We spend the first halves of our lives destroying ourselves and the second half trying to undo that,” he laughs.
His brother-in-law, a doctor, told him if he didn’t stop he would die and advised him that diet and lifestyle were key to being healthy.
At this stage, Ronnie had been diagnosed with high blood pressure and was diabetic, so he changed his diet and began to exercise.
“Three months later the symptoms were gone.”
He has since adopted as his motto the saying “We are as we eat, drink, sleep and exercise”. It makes sense, he says, “because the engine is only as good as what you put in it”.
He left Galway some time later, but although it’s over 40 years since he lived here, he has retained many close friendships in the West. He was very involved with the local community, including the GAA during his years here, and he helped bring Oranmore-Maree to the Galway Senior Hurling Final, which they lost to Castlegar.
After leaving Galway, Ronnie continued his day job in industry, a job that later involved overseeing the final stages of the Channel Tunnel, linking England and France. But he also began to study naturopathy and eventually people started coming to him for advice and natural remedies for ailments.
He did a correspondence course in natural health, although he never sat any exams and says that he is largely self-taught.
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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