Archive News
Presidential race as much about hindsight as vision
Date Published: {J}
How Martin McGuinness would love it if the past really was a different country – but the reality is that the self-confessed IRA man will spend the duration of this Presidential election campaign, answering infinitely more questions about what happened in the past than what might happen, if he were elected, in the future.
Ditto, David Norris, who must have searched long and hard to find legal advice that tied in with his wish to not release any more of these letters seeking mercy for his former boyfriend who had been convicted for the statutory rape of a fifteen year old boy.
We may like to shake off the darker days of our history, but life – and particularly a political one – is the sum total of all of the decisions we’ve made through our days, be it a link to brutal sectarian murder or interventions on behalf of child sex offenders.
We’ve seen Presidential campaigns in the past where candidates were vilified for far less; remember Adi Roche who was targeted on two fronts? One suggested that she wasn’t as nice as she was painted – an accusation that would rule 90 per cent of the population out of any race – and the second damned her by association, because of her brother’s unorthodox departure from the Defence Forces.
The same stick will be used to beat Mary Davis too – she will face question after question over her payments for participation on state boards, because there is very little else to attack her with, given that most of her public profile is down to her work with Special Olympians.
When the spin meisters kick into action, they can bring their dubious talents to work in a variety of ways – although you wouldn’t need a degree in the dark arts to target the weaknesses that will blight McGuinness and Norris over the next month.
The election campaign was officially one day old when Martin McGuinness was challenged by one of his Northern Ireland executive colleagues to reveal what she claims he knows about the Enniskillen bomb atrocity.
Arlene Foster, the North’s trade and industry minister, said there had been speculation for decades that it was the IRA from Derry which was involved in the 1987 bombing which killed eleven people as they gathered at the town’s cenotaph.
A day later, an even more damming piece appeared in the Irish Times alleging that McGuinness had a role in luring so-called IRA ‘informer’ Frank Hegarty back to Derry to his death in 1986 – an allegation the Sinn Féin MP vehemently denied.
McGuinness admits IRA membership but claims he left the organisation in 1974 – the only one believing that story appears to be the Deputy First Minister himself.
His history will continue to haunt him until the die is cast at the end of October – and rightly so. Because if, per chance, he were elected, that past would cast a long, dark shadow over his entire term of office.
The reality for McGuinness is that – short of announcing that he was indeed the IRA chief of staff – there is little he can about it.
If, hypothetically, he were to acknowledge a role in murders or bombings, he would be subjecting himself to the full rigours of the law. And even if the Good Friday Agreement would ensure he never served a sentence, his position – in southern politics at least – would be utterly untenable.
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
images/files/images/x3_Courthouse.jpg
Families queue up for school’s offer of free house
West has lower cancer survival rates than rest
Galway minors continue to lay waste to all opponents
Gardaí and IFA issue a joint appeal on summer road safety
Marathon Man plans to call a halt – but not before he hits 160 races
