Archive News
Roche on the rise as young pilot starts to shine on track
Date Published: {J}
FRANK FARRAGHER
LEIGH Roche remembers vividly his first morning at David Ryan’s racing stables on the road from Tuam to Gill’s Pub in Corofin.
He was 12 years old and his friend Declan Collins had a part time job, helping out with David Ryan. Leigh had already ridden a good few ponies and was looking forward to ‘the start’.
Things didn’t go according to plan though that Saturday morning. His first horse was a bit more temperamental than he expected, and shortly after mounting, Leigh found himself taking one almighty tumble.
To make matters worse, his mount decided to ‘walk all over him’, but Leigh Roche picked himself up, and within minutes was up on the saddle again.
Later that day, when David Ryan was talking to Leigh’s father — well known Galway GAA personality Francis Roche — he remarked that ‘his young lad’ certainly wasn’t lacking in courage. He put it a bit more bluntly than that: “He has balls. It didn’t knock a bother out of him. He just hopped up again after falling off.”
In its own way, as the last four years have panned out, that bit of cutting or courage, was to come to the fore. By the first week in July this summer, Leigh Roche had clocked up 28 career winners, 11 of them in 2011. Not bad going for a 19-year-old who left St. Jarlath’s College after doing his Junior Cert to try his luck at getting into the 10 month RACE ‘apprenticeship’ course at the Curragh.
There was no guarantee that he would secure one of the 32 places on offer with over 100 applying, but he wanted to chase his dream. Even though there was no tradition of racing in the family, horses had entered his bloodstream, taken up residence and refused to leave.
He got selected for the RACE course and thoroughly enjoyed its contents particularly the practical side, although there was also a touch of the academic stuff thrown in as well, such as English and Maths, which ‘kept the mother happy’.
Again only a small number of the 32 who graduate from RACE end up with a trainer. The students ‘make their play’ for placement at an open day for trainers who get the opportunity to ‘throw their eye’ over the prospective jockeys.
Some days later, after having met with Dermot Weld’s head lad, word came through that he was on his way to the stables of one of the world’s most famous trainers. A fair transition from that first day at David Ryan’s yard.
“I suppose all I can say that it was brilliant. There I was, in the heart of the Curragh, in the stables of Dermot Weld with over 100 top class horses. Later in 2008, I had my first winner — Fairy Flow in Navan — I felt like Lester Piggott,” said Roche.
The introduction to horses had all started a few years before his time at David Ryan’s, when Francis Roche took Leigh out to his native Abbeyknockmoy, where there were a few Shetland ponies at Jim McWalter’s farm in Newtown.
While the Shetlands might look small and docile, they can be a particularly ‘weasly’ strain of the equine family, and as a nine-year-old, Leigh got an early grinding on the dodgy temperament of the ponies. He was as often on the ground as in the saddle, but was always up again like a shot.
All a long way removed from the Tuesday of the Galway Races last year when Roche rode Weld’s Easy Mate to a thrilling victory in a two mile flat race at Ballybrit. It was the win that gave him his greatest thrill yet as a jockey.
Winning in Galway is always very special, but on your home turf with your friends from Tuam and Abbeyknockmoy cheering you on, this was ecstasy. He had to use all of his battling qualities to guide Easy Mate over the line first but the feeling afterwards was brilliant.
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
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