Archive News
Shock waves over Mountbellew objection
Date Published: {J}
FRANK FARRAGHER
A BOARDROOM decision to turf Connemara club Micheál Breathnach out of the Galway senior football championship following their first round victory over Mountbellew-Moylough last month, now looks set to ‘go the distance’ in terms of appeals and possible legal action.There were shock waves in Galway football circles last week when Mountbellew-Moylough lodged an objection to the ‘on-field’ 1-11 to 0-12 defeat that they suffered to Micheál Breathnach on Sunday, May 29 last, in Pearse Stadium.
Mountbellew-Moylough lodged their objection to the Competitions Controls Committee (CCC) of the Galway County Board on the basis that a Micheál Breathnach player, who came on as a sub in that game – Tommy Conneely – wasn’t a legal player for the club.
However the Micheál Breathnach club are understood to be furious at the implication that this player wasn’t legal to play with them as he lined out with the Inverin outfit for the last five years from under-14 level up. His brothers and sister have also played with the Ml. Breathnach club.
Mountbellew though have contended that because the Conneelys come from the Camus area of South Connemara – under the geographical wing of the Na Piarsaigh club in Rosmuc – they would not be entitled to play with Micheál Breathnach at adult level without a specific ‘permission to play’ clearance.
Back the years, the Conneely family who had returned from England to live in the Camus area, had made a special application to the Galway County Board for ‘permission to play’ clearance with the Ml. Breathnach club – after considering in detail the circumstances of this application, the Board decided to grant those requests, and this procedure has continued since then. However the permission to play procedure for the Conneelys did not come with the ‘blessing’ of the Na Piarsaigh club, the Connacht Tribune has learned.
The ‘technical problem’ that Ml. Breathnach and Tommy Conneely ran into this year was that the permission to play form signed by the player was made in relation to the under-21 grade specifically and did not state senior. If the application had either left out completely, specific mention of the under-21 grade, or alternatively had included the senior and adult grades, it is unlikely that the Mountbellew appeal would have succeded, the Tribune understands.
Because Na Piarsaigh field an adult junior A in the football league and championship, Mountbellew-Moylough successfully contended at last Wednesday night’s CCC meeting in Oranmore that this rendered Tommy Conneely to be an illegal player with Ml. Breathnach.
The CCC, made up of the County Board Chairman and Secretary – Gerry Larkin and Michael Monaghan – as well as the three main officers of the Football and Hurling Boards, heard submissions at the Maldron Hotel on the Wednesday night of June 8, from officers of both clubs. They decided to uphold the appeal lodged by the Mountbellew-Moylough club based on the ‘flaw’ in the permission to play application.
However within three days of that decision being made, the Ml. Breathnach club had lodged what is understood to be a very detailed and comprehensive appeal of that decision which is scheduled to be heard by the Hearings Committee of the Connacht Council at Ballyhaunis next Monday night.
Tom Cunningham, the secretary of the Mountbellew-Moylough club, told the Connacht Tribune that their club’s objection wasn’t ‘just based on a technicality’, but on the more principled issue of a club playing an illegal player. He said that it now seemed that the matter would be settled at the Hearings Committee of the Connacht Council next Monday night.
Coincidentally, Tom Cunningham is also secretary of that Hearings Committee, but he stressed that he would naturally be standing aside in relation to any adjudication on this matter.
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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