Archive News
Remembering the men who kept rugby alive in Connacht
Date Published: {J}
It would have been too much to hope that Connacht would beat Toulouse – but this was more, about the ‘Field of Dreams’.
This was about a rebirth for Connacht rugby and as one of the few who stood in the side pitches at the Sportsground 40 years ago, I could name those who were cheering in the background.
They included people like Claude Warner, Chris Crowley, ‘Lex’ Ryan and a gallant few others who went to the matches on Saturday afternoons.
The names just keep on rolling – Jo O’Donnell, Paddy Beatty, Frank Howard all of those in the ranks of referees and players such as Don Armstrong, Padraic Casssidy, Tony O’Sullivan and Johnny Dooley spring to mind.
The sports journalism part of this tiny group was led by Jimmy Lydon, Johnny McMahon and John Foley – at weekends all three were at various venues like the Sportsground, Fahy’s Field or Glenina as they collected the results of games involving the likes of Corinthians, Galwegians and ‘College’ (NUIG).
It was a small-time operation for the Press compared to the facilities laid on for the 9,000 attendance last Saturday night. It was not unusual to have just a handful of spectators at these games and the ‘Press Centre’ was the phone at Tom Holland’s house on College Road, while further Press ‘facilities’ were in Cullinane’s Pub on Eglinton Street and a few years later in the rather posh clubhouse built by Corinthians at Ard Na Cregg.
As the junior amongst the group, I would occasionally be pressed into action to cover the less important games on the side pitches on the Sportsground. The important part of the day was the meeting in Cullinane’s after the games and after the more important score lines had been rung in from Tom Holland’s phone.
If we are handing out tributes to people who kept Connacht rugby alive in the bad days, then Tom Holland surely played an important role.
You see, this was like a small club of people who were interested in a sport which could get a few thousand for an inter provincial, but on the average weekend the total attendance at one of the ordinary level games in the Sportsground might be Lex Ryan, Chris Crowley, Chris Crowley’s dog, with Jimmy Lydon and Johnny McMahon making up the Press gallery, which was in one corner of the then stand where the rain and wind swept through on Saturday afternoons which seemed to this reporter to go on forever.
At the Press Centre in Cullinanes, where the results were all put together, Jimmy Lydon or Johnny McMahon would scribble out the ordered 200 words about the game involving maybe, Corinthians and Galwegians, the great Galway rivals. Then there was a mad scramble to the few phones that were available.
These exotic Press facilities included the phone booth outside the Garda Station in Eglinton Street, just across from Cullinanes, Tom Holland’s in College Road, or the phone owned by the long suffering owners of Cullinanes, who on a Saturday afternoon knew their phone would be tied up for nearly an hour.
The system then in the newspapers and radio and television involved the use of copy takers, a group of highly competent typists who worked in the newspapers and typed out the copy from journalists as they stood in phone booths around the countryside.
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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