Archive News
Purr-fect solution to cat problem
Date Published: 14-Jun-2012
By Dermot Keys
When Claudia Frank first rescued a cat in Galway it was to give it a better life as a part of her own family.
However, she would end up helping hundreds of cats through Galway Cat Rescue, the volunteer organisation she co-founded with Olivia O’Reilly in 2010. The registered charity works to help sick, abandoned and abused cats and improve the lives of feral cats in Galway.
“The idea was to take homeless cats, stray cats and feral cats in Galway and give them a chance of a better life,” Claudia explained.
Although originally from Germany, Claudia moved to Galway seven years ago with her husband. Claudia’s love of cats was shared by her daughter and she had promised to get her a kitten. When Claudia found a homeless kitten in need of help, she saw a way to save it and fulfil her promise.
“I thought ‘I promised my daughter a cat anyway, so why not this one.’ It was a small little kitten. I brought her home and she survived. She was lovely.”
The family subsequently adopted two more cats. After talking to other people who also took in or fed cats, it soon became apparent that the numbers of feral or homeless cats were increasing.
Claudia jokes that she didn’t want to be the “crazy cat lady” with a garden full of cats so she started doing research and came across the humane, non-lethal method of Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) to control the feral cat population. Initially, Claudia tried to fund the process herself.
“I said I can afford to do one a month if I paid for it out of my own pocket. That is what I did for a year, but that was not going to make a big impact.”
She subsequently met Olivia O’Reilly, who had also started to feed cats in her own garden and noticed the numbers growing.
The two women decided to help these feral cats and Galway Cat Rescue was formed. It has gone on to neuter over 500 cats, re-home over 300 abandoned cats, and care for many others.
Feral cats can breed exponentially, with female cats capable of having up to 80 kittens in a lifetime and kittens capable of breeding after five to six months. TNR represents the best way to address the feral cat overpopulation crisis in Galway.
“The idea is to trap the cats, get them neutered so they don’t reproduce, and return them to the location so the feral cat population is kept stable. They defend their territory so they don’t let other cats in.
“When you don’t return the cats, you open up a niche and other cats move in. They start breeding and within a year you have the problem all over again.”
With the feral cat population no longer mating in a territory, it eradicates many of their disruptive behavioural problems.
“You don’t have the breeding, the smell, or get the noise.”
Feral cats don’t fight as much when they are no longer mating so this reduces the noise. This helps to reduce the spread of diseases such as Feline Immondeficiency Virus (FIV) or “feline AIDS”, which Claudia notes is a big problem in parts of the city. The effective use of NTR leads to a healthier feral and domestic cat population.
“It is in the interest of cat owners that feral cats are all neutered.”
The group have recently noticed an increase in the amount of domestic cats being abandoned as the recession takes hold. Domestic cats cannot be released as they are unable to fend for themselves so new homes must be found.
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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