Archive News
Setting his sights on the World Junior Athletic finals
Date Published: 17-May-2012
GALWAY City Harriers 800m runner Keith Fallon insists he is an athlete transformed – ever since he claimed the €12,000 prize package as winner of the inaugural BUA Emerging Sports Talent Award last year.
In the middle of a tough training regime, Fallon is currently aiming to secure his place on the Irish team travelling to the 14th IAAF World Junior Athletics Championships in Barcelona in July.
Although the Headford Road native – going on last year’s official PB – is three seconds outside the qualifying time, he still hopes he can book his place when the national qualifiers roll around in Tullamore next month.
“I have to run a time of 1:51 to get there,” outlines Fallon. “I ran 1:54 last year but as the man says, I am a complete different animal in training now. I just want to get out and race. I have only a couple of weeks left of real hard work and then it is ‘Go Time’.”
No doubt, the 19-year-old athlete has transformed – even reinvented – himself over the past 12 months, with the €12,000 prize package he secured through the BUA Award scheme last year allowing him to train full-time in pursuit of his goal.
The Award scheme, itself, was the brainchild of Keith Gildea of Ocean Fitness and it incorporates significant inputs from Trish Strelioff of Bailey Point Physiotherapy, Maeve Gacquin Nutrition Consulting, Sarah Thornton Personal Training, Dr. Aideen Henry of the Galway Clinic and Niamh Fitzpatrick, Sports Psychologist.
“It (the sports programme) started after my Leaving Cert. in June, which was great because it gave me a chance to study and meant I wasn’t trying to do two things at once. It was perfect and I got enough points then to do [primary school] teaching,” says Fallon, who is currently taking a year out from his studies.
“My nutrition wasn’t bad but I wasn’t properly fuelled. I didn’t have enough carbohydrates, wasn’t hydrated, but now I know I am eating the proper stuff and have enough energy to get me through the day. That comes down to the advice I have got from Maeve Gacquin.
“With the strength and conditioning, I am bigger and I am stronger and hopefully that will translate, particularly in the last 200m of a race. If I have much more power, obviously, I will finish quicker and that, ultimately, is the aim. Sarah Thornton does the strength and conditioning.
“My physio is Trish [Strelioff] and she is brilliant. She is always keeping me going; I am always in and out to her with different niggles or whatever. I was going to her before the BUA award and she knows me inside out by now, which is great. So, if I was to pick one physio in Galway, it would have been her. That was brilliant and she keeps me healthy.”
In addition to opening up other opportunities to Fallon – who has the option of taking up a scholarship next year at the California University of Pennsylvania if he so wishes – the BUA Award also granted him access to Ocean Fitness in Salthill, where he does his gym work. “It is the best gym in Galway by far,” says Fallon.
“It has got everything and it is not crowded. You are never waiting for machines. You can relax or work as hard as you want. To be honest, I nearly live down there. After training, you can go there to relax. I was in Limerick for a while and the gym in UL was almost always crowded. There’s no comparison.”
In any event, Fallon underlines that aside from the serious amount of money it has saved him in pursuing his dream, he has found the professional advice invaluable. “Just knowing that you are doing the right things!” he exclaims.
“You can read all the stuff and you can probably find out what to do on the internet but being told and advised on the best way to do things by someone who knows is totally different. Besides, every athlete is different but they (experts) really get to know you.
“So, it (BUA scheme) will change the sort of athlete you are and if nothing else it will encourage you to be a bit more professional. When you have all this, it really motivates you to go out on the wet days and run through the muck.”
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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