Tweet, tweet! Early bird catch worm – but annoys sleepers

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

An Púcán on Forster Street wowed the judges at a national awards ceremony last week. The city bar won two gongs at the Sky Bar of the Year Awards, which were held in the Mansion House in Dublin.

Firstly, they won the Connacht Bar of the Year, which is no mean feat for an establishment that only reopened some 14 months ago. Congratulations to them on that score.

It also won an award in the ‘Best Use of Social Media’ category.

According to the organisers of the awards, this category “recognises an establishment that is creative in their social media marketing and can show the success of their social media marketing campaign”.

The bar certainly used social media to drum up support for votes.

In the lead up to the awards ceremony, An Púcán (@anpucangalway) sent a private message to a Twitter follower at 3.41am.

“Sorry for disturbing”, began the message sent at an ungodly hour – what else would you be doing tweeting someone at that time but disturbing them?

“We’re finalists in Connacht Bar of The Year Award and need your vote please!”

The early-bird added a link in the private tweet so that the recipient could follow it and vote for the bar.

It obviously worked because they won. But one suspects they would have received far more votes – and goodwill – had they not woken people up in the middle of the night with tweeted messages pleading for support.

Jumping through hoops for Knocknacarra Centre

Why does it take so long to get anything done in this country?

Take the bizarre scenario with Knocknacarra Community Centre, for example. It’s been donkey’s years in the making and when it’s finally built, it’s not operating at full capacity because of a lack of staff.

Did nobody foresee that there might be a problem?

Did it not dawn on people, during the construction stages, that they might need a few extra bodies to run the facility once it’s completed; and that it might be a good idea to get cracking on that so the hiring of additional staff could coincide with its opening?

Evidently not.

The community centre opens but only during reduced hours because there is a ban on staff recruitment, and you need to get the minister to lift the ban.

So, Galway City Council Chief Executive, Brendan McGrath, two TDs (Derek Nolan and Brian Walsh) and two city councillors (Niall McNelis and Pádraig Conneely) have to take a day out of their busy schedules and head to Dublin to beg Minister Alan Kelly to lift the embargo on recruitment.

That was the first week of July.

It wasn’t until last week, a full two months later, that the Minister waded through all the nonsense bureaucracy of the civil service, and successfully got the embargo lifted. Two months!

And that’s only giving permission to the Council to hire the staff – there’s no extra commitment to fund the staff and it will be several more months before the Council even gets around to advertising vacancies for the jobs, and that’s only if they can scrounge together enough money to pay them.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.