Archive News
Sober Galway mentors are not into high fives!
Date Published: 11-Jul-2012
Dara Bradley
IF you didn’t know any better, the demeanour of the respective managements at the press conference in the aftermath of the enthralling Leinster hurling final on Sunday would have given no clue as to which team had won.
Kilkenny’s Brian Cody was first into the media room to analyse the game. Cody was Cody.
He looked and sounded like he always does: baseball cap perched atop his red-face, arms folded, Cody was calm, very matter-of-fact. You could detect no anger; zero emotion. You’d never have thought his side just suffered one of the heaviest hidings of his incredibly successful reign.
“No excuses,” he said, a phrase he repeated time and again. Fair enough, no excuses but had he any explanations, any reasons for losing by 10 points?
“The better team won”, the “winners were very emphatic”, Galway “dominated the game”, and again, “no excuses”, he said. Yeah, but . . . but . . . but . . . but what happened.
Did the overwhelming favourites tag get to them? “There’s no excuse. We don’t deal in excuses. It’s not as if we have the preserve on everything out there. I’ve sat here before having lost games with Kilkenny, that’s the way it is. We don’t make excuses; there’re no excuses. If you’re going to use the excuse that everybody thinks you’re going to win the game, it’s a very, very poor excuse to have because it’s won and lost on the field,” he said.
Maybe the absence of the likes of Michael Fennelly and JJ Delaney didn’t help? “We’ve never ever used being short a few players as a reason for winning or losing. That doesn’t matter, it doesn’t come into it, there’s no excuse. We had 15 players ready to start, we’d 15 players ready to come in, and anybody missing is not a factor at all as far as we’re concerned,” he said.
Were they ill-prepared for the intensity Galway brought, the standard they set? “Intensity is part and parcel of the game. I’ve often sat here and talked about the intensity we bring. It’s very much part of sport and part of hurling and if we weren’t prepared for that intensity we shouldn’t be around the place at all.
“We didn’t play well in the first half. It wasn’t a question that we didn’t have an answer to the intensity – we were dominated but that’s sport. There’re no excuses. It’s not a question of not being prepared. We prepared, we expected, we anticipated an absolute phenomenal challenge from Galway. We got that challenge and they were better than us,” added Cody. Full marks for honesty.
Next it was Galway’s turn. Out came manager Anthony Cunningham, flanked by his trusty lieutenants, Mattie Kenny and Tom Helebert. Sat stony-faced, the trio delivered their assessment, in a measured, level-headed manner. All very professional.
Cunningham had locked the players into conclave for a 20 minutes’ team meeting before they emerged to face the media, so maybe they got their high-fives, champagne popping and whooping out of the way then. But when the management team emerged, not one of them even cracked a smile.
Not a hint of a celebratory tone, which probably bodes well for the remainder of the All-Ireland campaign. Cunningham, Kenny and Helebert had prepared to win, expected to win (possibly not so emphatically) and their utterances afterwards confirmed as much.
They said they were thrilled with the win; thrilled with the performance but they were treating this historic triumph as a stepping stone to greater things.
“We’re very happy for what we’ve got today, which is winning the Leinster final for the first time ever and it’s a big step for us and we’re delighted for what happened, the way it happened and for how it happened,” said Helebert.
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
images/files/images/x3_Courthouse.jpg
Families queue up for school’s offer of free house
West has lower cancer survival rates than rest
Galway minors continue to lay waste to all opponents
Gardaí and IFA issue a joint appeal on summer road safety
Marathon Man plans to call a halt – but not before he hits 160 races
