So here we are, at the turn of the Galway year. They used to say that if there were intercounty players at the Galway Races, that they must be out of the championship, their boots hung up for another year.
Now, in these everchanging times, every intercounty player in the country, bar the camogie finalists, could attend the Galway races and not have a county game left to care about.
There is no doubt that the changing of the All-Ireland dates from something to ease us into the winter to a purely high summer sport has messed with our heads. In Covid times, we were all so desperate for something to watch that we would watch games at 3am, but now we are back in normality, we need something to sustain us through the year, even if it for the sake of our mental health in the long dark winter months.
Croke Park used to shut from the end of September to February. Now, it is shut from July to March. The way things are going, Chris Martin and Coldplay will play there more often next year than most counties. The hunger for things to watch and do was evident too by the runaway success of the Galway International Arts Festival.
Anyone who was at the Saw Doctors concerts over the last fortnight or at the Druid trilogy or The Pulse will have seen the massive appetite for something to stir us.
It was fantastic that there were record ticket sales, helped no end by the creation of new performance spaces — the transformation of the Kingfisher at the University of Galway being particularly impressive. Indeed, the very act of locating and converting ordinary spaces into something that can accommodate performance and exhibition is an art form itself, at which the team led by Jophn Crumlish and Paul Fahy are surely expert.
As the architecture of Galway changes in the coming years, so too increases the scope for new performance spaces. There is already great leverage in the new developments at Bonham Quay and Nuns Island and the Augustine Hill project for spaces to accommodate performance. Our lead story this week tells of another massive development with the Learning Common at the University of Galway, and these new places will in time be used to bring the Arts Festival right up its cententary and beyond.
With the aspect of Succession so in vogue with the success of the HBO series, it is pertinent for us to look at the prospects of a new generation to take up the mantle of developing the arts and culture in the west. And indeed for the generation beyond that.
To do this, we have to place culture at the heart of the lives of young people raised by the Internet; an entire generation has had social media as their bedfellow, and what stems from that will be revealing.
The Irish Government should consider a project already in place in other European countries, that on their 18th birthday, everyone is given a voucher to the value of €200 to be spent on purchasing cultural material, be it books from independent bookstores, art from small galleries, music or artistic materials. It’s not to be blown on one Coldplay ticket, but to give a boon to the culture industry and simultaneously to give everyone a gift of culture that will lead them to appreciate the need and richness that comes from culture.
We have a proud tradition here in the west of inspiring artistic expression. I am particularly thrilled that this week saw Elaine Feeney nominated for the Booker longlist for her work How To Build A Boat. Elaine is a writer who takes a rich inspiration from what goes on all around her and we wish her the best when the list is shortened at the end of this month.
There are hundreds of Elaine Feeneys out there in our city and county waiting to be inspired and discovered. Let us build an industry and an appreciation that will allow them to flourish in their own place.
