Archive News
‘No room at inn’ as 170 more join housing list
Date Published: 24-Dec-2009
HUNDREDS of families and individuals right across Galway City are facing a bleak Christmas and have found there was ‘no room at the inn’ in terms of City Council housing as waiting lists for social housing from the local authority have swollen to more than 2,600.
And a local housing agency has warned that the city’s housing crisis could worsen once the banks moratorium on repossessing homes ceases and repossessions soar in 12 to 18 months as families in communities all over the city, grapple with pay cuts job losses, the prospect of long-term unemployment and struggle to keep up with their mortgage repayments.
There are 2,614 families, couples and single people this Christmas on Galway City Council’s social housing waiting list and facing into the New Year with the grim prospect of not securing a home for up to seven years.
Waiting times for those on the City Council list have fallen slightly but the wait for a home on the east side of the city is now around five years and it is seven years for a home on the west side of the city.
The Council currently has a social housing stock of around 2,200, of which 85 are vacant. Ten of the empty homes are newly completed and haven’t been offered yet while the remaining 75 are in need of repair before they are offered to people on the list.
The refusal rate for social housing has dropped considerable to 36% and this is likely to fall further in 2010 as people’s expectations fall.
Director of Services for Housing at Galway City Council, Joe O’Neill, told the Galway City Tribune it is very unlikely that the Council will be able to add to that stock next year, even though it has planning permission to build 69 homes on the Ballymoneen Road.
“The Government has indicated it will not have any money for us to build new accommodation in 2010 but we will be looking at a system where we will lease some of the vacant properties that are in the city. This leasing system is being looked at by Government because of the amount of empty houses,” he said.
The city office of Threshold, a national not for profit organisation that helps solve people’s housing problems in both the private and local authority sectors, dealt with 3,631 queries this year, up 22% on 2008, and of those 1,590 are people who have ongoing problems.
Deirdre Murphy, the Galway Co-ordinator for Threshold, said people generally don’t contact the agency until they have reached ‘crisis point’. She said repossessions haven’t affected Galway this year due to the moratorium but once the banks lift the moratorium, the amount of people unable to repay their mortgages and have their homes confiscated by financial institutions will become clear.
Mr O’Neill noted that the social housing list would be far greater now if a moratorium wasn’t in place.
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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