Archive News
Sit back, relax and enjoy the torture!
Date Published: 13-Sep-2012
Where are we going on holiday?” “I don’t know. Let’s see where Michael O’Leary wants us to go.”
Such is the power of Ryanair that when the Snapper and I planned our first holiday for two and half years, we knew that we’d be going somewhere that the airline flies to from either Knock or Shannon.
At this stage of things I’m pretty familiar with the Ryanair website. I know how to jump through its hoops, finding all the new places where a box has to be checked, a drop-down menu has to be obeyed, and am aware that if we want to check bags and take priority boarding, we can add around €100 to the advertised fare.
O’Leary is the catalyst of a massive success in social engineering. We all do as we’re told. We fly from Ryanair airport to Ryanair airport. Terminals are filled with passengers pulling little 10kg bags, which don’t have to be checked in, because if everyone checked in bags Ryanair’s planes couldn’t be turned around in 25 minutes. If they take longer than that, the company starts to lose money.
It’s all about speed, which is why passengers are herded onto flights in such a way that your colyoomist finds it difficult to resist the temptation to start going “Mmmooo-ooo!” and “Baaa-baaa-baaa!” as we’re moved along.
From the days when the journey to a foreign destination was something to look forward to, flying is now the opposite of exotic.
To be fair to Ryanair, it does what it says it will. It gets you there on time, a task admittedly much facilitated by timetables that allow at least an extra half an hour on the actual flying time.
As a grown-up, I’d really like to believe I have some control over my own behaviour, but for some reason flying Ryanair drives me demented. I know that its website will be testing, so I play by O’Leary’s laws until I want something different, and then choose to pay him handsomely to do it my way. All fine and fluffy enough, but every time I slump down in my seat on the plane, I try and fail to contain my ire.
I know the flight is only an hour or two out of my life. I know that the cabin crew are just doing their job; that it’s not their fault. I know what’s going to happen and know that I am capable of being a strong person.
But as soon as the attendant comes over the tannoy and tells us to sit back, relax and enjoy the flight, every muscle in my body goes tense, including the ones that seem to crush my brainbox. It’s ridiculous, I know, especially as I am well versed in the ways of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I’ve meditated, been mindful and spent a wedgy chunk of my life trying to improve my infantile reactions to known stimuli.
This is my known stimulus: ‘Sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.’
Maybe if they didn’t say that, I’d manage better. Maybe if they said “Sit back and prepare to be bombarded by an incessant series of sales pitches delivered with no enthusiasm by an exhausted and overworked crew who have to pile through this entire damned list five times a day, at ear-screeching volume levels, in a variety of completely unintelligible accents!” I might be able to handle it just a little better.
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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