Archive News
Putting Galway in the driving seat
Date Published: 26-Apr-2012
By Dermot Keys
Galway may be best known for its culture and its nightlife but a new Chauffeur School plans to make the city synonymous with executive driver training in Ireland.
MPM Associates has opened Ireland’s first and only chauffeur school in Ballybrit to respond to the increasing demand for professionally-trained drivers. The Professional Executive Driver Training Courses are run by the former Galway Mayoral Driver, Danny Maguire, along with Ronan McLoughlin and Catherine Penston of Right Track Training and Professional Bodyguards Ireland.
It is a novel idea but Danny told the Galway City Tribune that the motivation behind setting up the course was the complete lack of accredited training opportunities within Ireland.
“I always wanted to do these courses but they were never available,” he explained.
“In the industry, you can go out and get a licence and call yourself a chauffeur but you are not professionally trained. There has never been any training involved. It is like someone saying they can add up numbers and calling themselves an accountant.”
Danny has extensive experience in the industry and he has worked with the United States Secret Service and with numerous celebrities in the past as well as being the Mayoral driver in Galway. Despite his own hands-on experience, he recalls the first time that he attended a protection course.
“I went to the first protection course and it was an eye opener. It just proved that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. You may have many years experience but, when you sit down in a classroom, you realise that there is a lot more that you never knew.”
The new training courses offer three different levels of courses – the Professional Executive Driver Training, Advanced Executive Protection Driver training, and the Specialist Executive Protection Driver – City & Guilds Close Protection Level 3.
A number of the graduates from the course have already gained employment in the London Olympics and four others have recently travelled over to London for interviews.
“We have provided a number of drivers for the Olympics. It’s great as we are training them to the Security Industry Authority UK standard, so once they are certified by the academy they can get work without a problem.”
Danny added that they are also hopeful of securing more business when the Volvo Ocean Race visits the city.
The basic course teaches people all the skills needed to be a qualified chauffeur, including driving skills, etiquette and protocol, convoy driving, vehicle maintenance, manual handling and deportment. The course also helps prospective drivers feel confident in the role.
“What we found was that the professional training was a huge benefit to the drivers and it gives them great confidence and self esteem. You have to be confident. That’s what it is all about. That is what these courses do.”
Danny added that there is a demand for trained professionals in this region.
“We get quite a few people like celebrities or foreign dignitaries who are travelling through the West of Ireland. These people come in and they require a certain standard of professional driver to work with them.
“It is about knowing how to behave around celebrities and foreign dignitaries. I have been asked by clients to provide professionally-trained drivers. I can only do so much myself so, by training other drivers, I can supply the demand for professional drivers.
“We may not know them personally so we cannot make any guarantees of future employment but we can put them all on our database.”
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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