Featured
Raw recruit Yoshimi puts taste of Japan on the menu
Lifestyle – Judy Murphy talks to a woman who came to Galway to learn English and introduced the city to delights of sushi
The omens weren’t good when Yoshimi Hayakawa arrived in Ireland from Japan in 2001, having come here to study English. Her ultimate destination was Galway but she flew in to Dublin, unaware that on the day she landed, a major soccer match was taking place.
Not having pre-booked accommodation, Yoshimi couldn’t find a bed. Initially, she stayed in the bus station and, when it closed, she spent hours wandering the streets with her backpack, looking for a hostel and encountering lots of drunken Irish people.
Once she’d lived here for a while, Yoshimi realised drunken Irish people were no threat, but coming from Japan, where public drunkenness is not the norm, she was terrified.
“I decided I’d leave soon,” she recalls with a laugh. But she didn’t.
Fifteen years on, Yoshimi has become part of the fabric of Galway City, where she runs the popular Wa Café restaurant on New Dock Street. It specialises in the food of her native country mostly using ingredients from Galway. And, having introduced Irish diners to the delights of Japanese dishes, Yoshimi has also taken to training Irish chefs in Japan’s specialised method of preparing and cooking food.
Wa Café, near the Docks, is a small, simply decorated space that seats about 20 and also offers a take-out service. A blackboard behind the counter informs customers of the daily sushi specials which are prepared in the kitchen behind.
As we sample an elderflower and ginger cordial prepared by Patrick Philips, one of her Irish chefs, Yoshimi explains that coming to Ireland opened up possibilities that she could never have dreamed of in Japan.
Working with a company that manufactured vinegar and other condiments she sold sushi products to supermarkets, “but never dreamed I would become a sushi chef”.
That certainly wasn’t her intention when she came to Galway.
“I’d planned to travel around Europe. The EU was expanding and the euro had just come in and I wanted to witness it,” she explains. “But before that, I came to Ireland.”
Yoshimi admits now that she didn’t know much about Ireland and could as easily have been going to Iceland!
But when she came to Galway and met people from France, Italy, Spain and other parts of the EU, everything changed.
“I realised I didn’t need to travel, because everybody was here.”
She loved Galway from the beginning.
“After a month, I wanted to open a Japanese restaurant here. I was joking, but only half joking,” she recalls.
Yoshimi was a student at the Galway Language School, staying with a host family. Her host, Barbara McKeown, encouraged her to cook Japanese food and invite her fellow students around for dinner.
These students, who came from all over Europe, loved Yoshimi’s food and the more they sampled it, they more they encouraged her to open her own restaurant.
Yoshimi, who had learned cooking from her mother, was surprised at this – becoming a professional chef in Japan requires many years of training, so it wasn’t something she’d ever considered.
Japanese food was a novelty for many of her friends in the early 2000s, she explains. “Even French people I met hadn’t tasted it.”
So she began to give the idea of a restaurant serious consideration.
In her early days, cooking for friends, she did try out a few authentic recipes, such as monkfish liver, but “it was too adventurous”.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Significant state investment is required to address ‘shocking’ inequalities that leave cancer patients in the West at greater risk of succumbing to the disease.
A meeting of Regional Health Forum West heard that survival rates for breast, lung and colorectal cancers than the national average, and with the most deprived quintile of the population, the West’s residents faced poorer outcomes from a cancer diagnosis.
For breast cancer patients, the five-year survival rate was 80% in the West versus 85% nationally; for lung cancer patients it was 16.7% in the west against a 19.5% national survival rate; and in the West’s colorectal cancer patients, there was a 62.6% survival rate where the national average was 63.1%.
These startling statistics were provided in answer to a question from Ballinasloe-based Cllr Evelyn Parsons (Ind) who said it was yet another reminder that cancer treatment infrastructure in the West was in dire need of improvement.
“The situation is pretty stark. In the Western Regional Health Forum area, we have the highest incidence of deprivation and the highest health inequalities because of that – we have the highest incidences of cancer nationally because of that,” said Cllr Parsons, who is also a general practitioner.
In details provided by CEO of Saolta Health Care Group, which operates Galway’s hospitals, it was stated that a number of factors were impacting on patient outcomes.
Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.
On the eve of completing his 150th marathon, an odyssey that has taken him across 53 countries, Loughrea’s Marathon Man has announced that he is planning to hang up his running shoes.
But not before Jarlath Fitzgerald completes another ten races, making it 160 marathons on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
“I want to draw the line in 2026. I turn 57 in October and when I reach 60 it’s the finishing line. The longer races are taking it out of me. I did 20 miles there two weeks ago and didn’t feel good. It’s getting harder,” he reveals.
“I’ve arthritis in both hips and there’s wear and tear in the knees.”
We speak as he is about to head out for a run before his shift in Supervalu Loughrea. Despite his physical complaints, he still clocks up 30 miles every second week and generally runs four days a week.
Jarlath receives injections to his left hip to keep the pain at bay while running on the road.
To give his joints a break, during the winter he runs cross country and often does a five-mile trek around Kylebrack Wood.
He is planning on running his 150th marathon in Cork on June 4, where a group of 20 made up of work colleagues, friends and running mates from Loughrea Athletics Club will join him.
Some are doing the 10k, others are doing the half marathon, but all will be there on the finishing line to cheer him on in the phenomenal achievement.
Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.
From the Galway City Tribune – An impassioned plea for a ‘masterplan’ that would guide Galway City into the future has been made in the Dáil. Galway West TD Catherine Connolly stated this week that there needed to be an all-inclusive approach with “vision and leadership” in order to build a sustainable city.
Deputy Connolly spoke at length at the crisis surrounding traffic and housing in Galway city and said that not all of the blame could be laid at the door of the local authority.
She said that her preference would be the provision of light rail as the main form of public transport, but that this would have to be driven by the government.
“I sat on the local council for 17 years and despaired at all of the solutions going down one road, metaphorically and literally. In 2005 we put Park & Ride into the development plan, but that has not been rolled out. A 2016 transport strategy was outdated at the time and still has not been updated.
“Due to the housing crisis in the city, a task force was set up in 2019. Not a single report or analysis has been published on the cause of the crisis,” added Deputy Connolly.
She then referred to a report from the Land Development Agency (LDA) that identified lands suitable for the provision of housing. But she said that two-thirds of these had significant problems and a large portion was in Merlin Park University Hospital which, she said, would never have housing built on it.
In response, Minister Simon Harris spoke of the continuing job investment in the city and also in higher education, which is his portfolio.
But turning his attention to traffic congestion, he accepted that there were “real issues” when it came to transport, mobility and accessibility around Galway.
“We share the view that we need a Park & Ride facility and I understand there are also Bus Connects plans.
“I also suggest that the City Council reflect on her comments. I am proud to be in a Government that is providing unparalleled levels of investment to local authorities and unparalleled opportunities for local authorities to draw down,” he said.
Then Minister Harris referred to the controversial Galway City Outer Ring Road which he said was “struck down by An Bord Pleanála”, despite a lot of energy having been put into that project.
However, Deputy Connolly picked up on this and pointed out that An Bord Pleanála did not say ‘No’ to the ring road.
“The High Court said ‘No’ to the ring road because An Bord Pleanála acknowledged it failed utterly to consider climate change and our climate change obligations.
“That tells us something about An Bord Pleanála and the management that submitted such a plan.”
In the end, Minister Harris agreed that there needed to be a masterplan for Galway City.
“I suggest it is for the local authority to come up with a vision and then work with the Government to try to fund and implement that.”
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
