Archive News
Trauma of first day back at school stays with you forever
Date Published: {J}
There are some moments in life you will never forget – no matter how much you wish you could. Strangely most of them involve school – and with all due respects to the start the Leaving Cert, nothing beats the pain of that first day back at school.
This week another 60,000 innocent five year olds started down that path that will end for them with the Leaving Cert in 2022 or 2023.
That’s a wake-up call for the rest of us, but for them, for the moment, it’s about ensuring you get a good spot in the sand pit so you can make castles and wreak havoc on the best efforts of others.
Indeed whatever trauma they’re going through is dwarfed by the tears of the Mammies with their faces pressed up against the glass of the classroom window, utterly convinced of the end of the world as we know it.
While the new arrivals may have been lured into a false sense of security, for the more seasoned veterans of the education system, the first day back at school brings with it the dread of knowing what it is really like because you’d been down this road before.
The summer holidays were over, the long nights were drawing in and you were stuck in classrooms and study halls – albeit with breaks for mid-term, Christmas, mid-term, Easter and innumerable ‘staff service’ days – until the evenings started to stretch again the following May.
Of course the teachers felt the same way but at least they were paid to be there – and they only had to be proficient in one or two subjects as opposed to having a daily inquisition on the whole bloody lot of them.
Not that school was all bad – in fact I remember my days in St Mary’s College with particular fondness even now – but it was that sinking feeling as you walked through the gates that this was your life for the next nine or ten months.
As a boarder, that pain was multiplied because we returned for duty on a Sunday night . . . under cover of darkness in a car packed with blankets, bed linen and enough clothes to do you until you next saw the washing machine at home.
The height of luxury was a packet of Kimberleys which you’d have to eat late at night under the blankets for fear of having to share them out with the rest of the dormitory, leaving you with about one of the bickies if you were lucky.
Even now those dark winter evenings are as vivid as if they happened this week – although within an hour, once you hooked up with your old friends, you were back in the old routine.
Then there was the smell of the place – an indescribable aroma of chalk, books and decades of schoolboys’ socks – along with the names from the past etched onto desks and classroom walls with compasses.
We had the added ‘benefit’ of a school diet with consisted of everything and anything once it included baked beans, a food form I am unable to countenance to this day because it will forever be associated with those large silver trays that had enough food for ten normal boys . . . or about five boarders.
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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