Archive News
Twitter has its merits Ð pity about the name
Date Published: {J}
How are your hostages doing? You just have to feed them and give them water and stuff, it isn’t hard. And yet I killed a few hostages this year. Getting a driving licence for example.
Getting more exercise too. Though on the bright side, those pretty much cancel each other out. I didn’t really get a single thing I planned to do in 2009 done – but on the other hand I did do a lot of things I didn’t. I learned to row a boat this year.
Trivial perhaps, but great too. I learned how to use a sauna – a real, wood-fired one. I learned a lot of good exercises for the spine – the back pain I was getting last year is entirely gone now. (All right, I injured my coccyx and now it hurts to sit down, but that’s completely unrelated.)
I got to spend a lot of time with small children and eventually realised that I should stop thinking about how to talk to them and just talk to them.
These are things I didn’t expect to learn this year. But enough of me.
What was 2009 for the rest of the world – what was it the year of? Obama presidency. Lisbon Treaty. Swine flu.
Important things happened, the world changed in a lot of ways. Yet I think the biggest thing of 2009 was Twitter. Social networking systems in general reached critical mass, but it’s Twitter that fascinates me most. Not least, because it seems inexplicable.
Why would someone want to send a message no longer than a text to a web page? You can already send text messages to your friends, and those have the advantage of being private. You can already publish things on the web, and that doesn’t have a 142-character limit.
Twitter seems to combine the worst features of both. I freely admit I didn’t get it when it first came out in 2007, but I wasn’t doing it right. I was sending Twitter messages (‘tweeting’) from my phone, but receiving them on it too.
So the apparent benefit was getting pointless and frequently inane messages from friends around the world, at all times of day and night. This quickly became irritating, and I wrote it off.
But as Twitter grew, the way people used it evolved. The genius of the shortness became apparent. Sure, anyone can write a blog. But who’s going to read it? I rarely bother to read Livejournal posts if they go beyond a paragraph, even when they’re by friends who write entertaining and hilarious stuff.
But I will voraciously read short messages. You can take them in almost at a glance, and the next one could be something good. (Interesting thing to note is that though you can make posts as long as you like on Facebook, people tend not to.
More and more it’s morphing into an (overcomplicated) rival to Twitter.)
It’s become a place where you can make a remark that your friends may be interested in, or crack a joke, or let people know your plans – a universal message board. This was one of the very first uses of computer networks of course, but in 2009 it finally became part of everyday life.
Shame about the obligatory stupid name.
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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