Archive News
The lies of Haughey continue to haunt us
Date Published: {J}
After a great deal of research, I have proved conclusively that it does someone no harm to dance on their grave. It is a pointless gesture though. Haughey’s heirs have easily outdone him, and they’re doing it to us right now.
They assure us that extending the bank guarantee is “part of its gradual phasing out”. (I suppose that’s true, in the same sense that starting it was the first step in a gradual process of stopping it.) People are getting more and more reluctant to lend us the money we need just to keep going, and the biggest idea this Government seems to have is to make the poor work for nothing.
Let’s face it, they’re an incompetent shower of bastards.
This is an unhappy country. Not because of wealth or because of poverty, but because of injustice. It’s been shown time and again that the countries with the least inequality are the happiest, yet inequality has been allowed to positively flourish here.
Occasionally it’s justified as the “dynamic” that drives the economy, but that’s self-serving nonsense. Just because a little mustard improves a sandwich that doesn’t mean you can make it even better with a canister of pepper spray.
Most of the time though no one even attempts to excuse it – why bother justifying yourself when you’re king? The simple fact of the matter is that inequality increases because the richer you are, the easier it is to become richer. So money has a tendency to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Is it surprising then that the market crashes? Historically this has been a (very crude and damaging) form of self regulation, a reset or “new game”. People are more equal after a crash – for the obvious reason that there’s a lot more nothing to go round, but also because they learn from the experience and for some time afterwards there is more emphasis in politics on equality and fairness.
Shortly before the Wall Street Crash, 18% of America’s wealth had ended up in the hands of just 1% of the population. After it, though, the US was a significantly more equal place, reaching record levels of fairness in the 1940s and maintaining that standard all through the ’50s and ’60s. Things really were better in the America of a few decades ago.
So can we expect a great post-Depression improvement for Irish society? I’m doubtful. In the Wall Street crash, a vast amount of money almost literally vanished because it was found to be largely imaginary, the result of accounting fictions and speculation.
Exactly the same thing happened in our construction boom of course, it was all based on fantasy house prices, but instead of letting the false money evaporate, we seem to be trying desperately to pretend it’s still real. To do so we are throwing good money after bad – and we have to borrow the good money.
People in the future are being robbed to prop up the fake wealth of our ruling 1% today!
Right now the best advice you could give your grandchildren is to be born somewhere else.
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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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