Archive News
Wrapping up with the final word on Christmas presents
Date Published: 04-Jan-2012
Why don’t Christmas presents all come in square boxes as standard? I mean have you ever tried to wrap a toy car in a multi-angled box and not lost the will to live?
And anyway how would you disguise a football so that it looks like anything other than……a football?
Is there a way of hiding the fact that you’re giving someone a CD – and short of putting a book in a shoebox, it will always look like a book.
A bottle of wine would look like a bottle of wine even if you wrapped it in a blanket, despite the fact that drinks companies – and whiskey distillers in particular – are doing their best to come up with a presentation box. But now you have to wrap a cylinder, which is fine until you try to tidy up the wrapping paper at either end.
Then there’s the possibility of mistaken identity – like if you bought your loved one a very practical iPod Nano – and it’s mistaken in a rush of excitement for a little box with a much more romantic, but non-existent, ring.
At the end of the day, no matter what you do, once the presents go under the tree, little fingers begin to poke holes in the vulnerable parts of the wrapping to see if a glimpse of what lies beneath can clear up any remaining mystery as to its identity.
So quite honestly there’s little point in bothering with all that wrapping – particularly when you’re ultimately going to be left with yards of coloured paper at a time of the year when they bin is overflowing and the next collection – if you live in Galway city anyway – isn’t until the middle of January.
You can of course put your purchase into one of those present bags so that nobody has a clue what it is and you’ll also save yourself a fortune in Sellotape. But frankly if you want to give a present in a bag, you might as well just leave it in the one you bought it in.
Wrapping a square or rectangular box is child’s play; you need a scissors and some sticky tape, with a kitchen table on which to perform your task as an added bonus.
But wrapping the equivalent of an octopus would require the dexterity of an acrobat……and the patience of Mother Teresa.
Of course all of this is a precursor to the real stress – have you bought something that is remotely appropriate or appreciated or, for the ninth year in a row, have you made a complete bags of it?
And how are you supposed to react when someone thinks they’ve bought you the best present ever and it’s taking you all your time not to throw up all over it.
I’ve been given tickets for concerts by bands I wouldn’t go to see if they were playing at the end of the garden; one year I even got meat – loads of it – and on more than one occasion the present I didn’t jump with delight on opening was taken back and exchanged….but the resulting voucher or refund never made it back to me.
It’s a sort of a variation on the ‘dog isn’t just for Christmas’ line – because in my case sometimes a present is just for Christmas and it has to go back where it came from in the New Year.
The other problem with presents for kids is the small pieces that go along with the ship or the castle or the doll’s house.
Because there’s nothing quite like the imprint of a little figurine or a piece of Lego in the soul of your bare foot on a cold January morning to wake you up cursing Santa and vowing to write to him to ask him to just give vouchers to everyone next time he’s dropping in.
See full column in 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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