I don’t get excited anymore about the flick of a switch and seeing a light coming on. In fact the thrill of being thrilled by lights has dimmed somewhat since the heady days of the rural electrification scheme when Paddy might have been excited by seeing the surprised look on the cow’s face on those otherwise dark nights of the 1930s. And because lights don’t negate the need for Viagra anymore in any of us, it is heartening to see that this year the good burghers of Galway are to look beyond lights to make Galway festive and instead are to turn Eyre Square into Little Bavaria this winter to create an atmospheric Christmas market — a sort of Volvo Ocean Race for the winter where all sorts of Germanic and mainland European festival flavours will convert our central plaza from the great nothingness that it is into something to be savoured and enjoyed by thousands of families.
More than 60 wooden chalets will be constructed on the Square, with each stall selling a wide selection of goods and foods. Throw in some nippy weather and some seasonal music and the square will get a feeling of usefulness it never gets outside Macnas parade and protest parade times.
At least one third of these stalls are available to be leased by local traders, and many of the city’s market traders have embraced the event in the knowledge that it will generate major footfall in the four weeks from mid-November to mid-December and then depart leaving the last two weeks of Christmas shopping solely to the city traders. They and many others recognise that this is a major event that can do nothing but good for business, yet there have been lots of little rumblings already from the DarnnIWish IThoughtOfThatMyself brigade wrapped up as concern for the ratepayers and local businesses.
Too many events/plans/proposals in this town are held up or spoiled because of a lack of widescale support and it is organisations and offices such as that of the Mayor and the Chamber that should lead the way in looking at the bigger picture instead of protecting narrow interests of membership and business collegiality.
They should be more welcoming to an event that will surely attract tens of thousands into the city in a year when we can bloody well do with it.There is no doubt that the ratepayers of the city will benefit from this if they market their wares sufficiently. A lot of the vendors at the VOR were from outside town, but the pull of the event and those vendors had a massive knock-on effect for city businesses, so let’s please look at the bigger picture and make this memorable and lucrative,
Put 20,000 people into Eyre Square each day for a month and you can’t convince me that they’ll stay there all day. Undoubtedly they will filter down through the town to complete their Christmas shopping. After all there are only so many pairs of lederhosen and cuckoo clocks that you can give granddad this Christmas.
This is a marvellous idea and one that I alluded to myself (former member of the DarnIWish IThoughtOfThatMyself brigade ) in this column about four years ago in reference to the Belgian city of Bruges where every winter, the central square (yes the place where Brendan Gleeson went splat in the eponymous movie ) houses an icerink and associated stalls and chalets, creating a magical winter wonderland. I wondered if Galway would ever have the foresight for this and now it has. Galway can market itself as a market town this Christmas. It is up to hotels and businesses to offer market specials and link in with this great crowd-puller. However, at times like this when businesses are suffering, what we do not need is official indifference.
Now, where’s my German cuckoo-clock. “Ve have vays of making you tock!”
