Choose our councillors carefully — and reap the benefits in a decade

Thu, Feb 27, 2014

Over the next few months, a considerable amount of public money will be spent on making some very practical changes to our council chambers. In County Hall, the price of a house is being set aside to make room for the nine extra councillors who will take their seats there for the first meeting in June. Across the city in City Hall, the councillors will be asked to shed a few pounds and a few euro to make room for the slightly more respectable additional number of three councillors who will be elected to the new council.

City must be ‘happy’ with toe-tapping video

Thu, Feb 20, 2014

In the 10 years this month since Facebook was founded - initially among students at Harvard University - it has become an accepted and acceptable worldwide media tool.

The stroke and wink are still alive

Thu, Jan 16, 2014

I remember years ago covering Western Health Board meetings in far flung corners of the province where the matron of the hosting hospital would provide fine fillets of salmon and local sean nos singers to entertain the councillor-filled Board so that they wouldn’t starve on the return leg of their expenses-paid journeys.

We underestimate the possibilities of our friend, the sea

Thu, Jan 09, 2014

For most of the time, it just sits there, the pretty backdrop to the postcard that is our city and county, calm and rocking, its gentle waves lovingly lapping at our coast like a friendly puppy. And because it has been such an acquiescent friend, we have tended to disregard all of its possibilities, the good and the bad.

Don’t get stressed over Christmas

Thu, Dec 12, 2013

With all of the cronyism and financial vulgarity that emerged yesterday at the PAC hearings into the squandering of money at the Central Remedial Clinic, one could be forgiven for thinking that donations to charities this year should be put on the long finger. Especially when money is so tight in every household.

Generosity of spirit must remain the essence of Christmas

Thu, Nov 28, 2013

Americans around the world will today celebrate their traditional Thanksgiving - believed to have begun as an autumn harvest festival in the 17th century and a time for people to give thanks for what they have.

Market creates festive atmosphere

Thu, Nov 21, 2013

At this very moment, the view outside my window is positively Lilliputian. Many men and women are hammering away creating an experience that will be enjoyed by many over the next month. But what is far more important is that the vision that is taking shape is one that will be the boon this city and county needs in the run up to the most important time of the year for local businesses.

Spare a few euro for those who have lost all

Thu, Nov 14, 2013

The Filipinos are a very resilient people. I know from personal experience how they can go with a flick of a switch from the depths of despair to the extremes of happiness. Their smile makes them the envy of the world. Their industriousness makes them popular and in demand employees and friends all over the world. Many million of them work overseas in a variety of conditions and environments, to send much needed funds back to families — a concept with which this country is familiar.

As a community overseas, they are helpful, friendly, and pleasant. As a nation, they are peaceloving and cordial. Their political movements gave us the concept of people power in the face of extreme dictators.

The impact of a Mayo victory

Thu, Sep 19, 2013

Galway should brace itself next week for a variety of unexpected emotional responses from otherwise rational people. Grown men could burst into tears in the street, rip off their clothes and run naked through the Square; logical women might be seen muttering to themselves, staring at the skies, wondering how this thing has come to pass. Families could be torn apart from the demon drink; marriages ripped asunder as previously pleasant understandings become irreconcilable differences. In fact, one wonders if the Chamber of Commerce have made allowances for the fact that hundreds and hundreds of staff may not turn up for work, and indeed, may never be seen again, as they cast off the baggage of decades past. And this, the week after the camogie players of Galway slew all before them on the hallowed turf.

Well done to all who brokered football compromise

Thu, Sep 12, 2013

The news that came out way last night that compromise has been reached in the ongoing campaign to have a single unified team representing Galway city and county in League of Ireland football is to be welcomed. Although, as is the case with most compromises, the solution is not ideal for all parties who may have had to budge from their original positions, it is good news for the football fan who has missed the fortnightly trips to Eamonn Deacy Park.

At last, a team and a cause for all on the Dyke Road

Thu, Aug 22, 2013

For those of us for whom Friday nights were irrevocably changed when top flight football left Terryland, there will always be a memory of the cups of Bovril and the smell of wintergreenand the smack of leather on a hardened hip in the days before the Dyke Road venue became one of the best football stadiums in the country. Back then with the pitch facing a different alignment, the cold breeze coming in off the Corrib on those winter’s days hardened many a memory in the minds of football fans across not just the city and county, but beyond. Back then when the man after whom the ground is now named marshalled the centre of the pitch, when the Bovril in your cup rippled with every thundering tackle from Miko Nolan, when Kevin Cassidy ran Mario Kempes-style through the hearts of many a defence, when Philip Fay and Carl Humphries threaded the ball down the sidelines like needles in the hands of a seasoned seamstress, they created a sort of magic for every youngster in the ground. And later when Ricky and Jumbo and Donie et al carried that magic to Glenina and back, there was a feeling that no matter the result, you never went home feeling cheated from a day out at Terryland.

A break from the madding crowd...

Thu, Aug 08, 2013

When you were young and the Yanks and those ‘ovah’ from the UK would come home for weeks on end, sporting the sort of clothes and the richness of tan that we only ever saw through the pages of National Geographic magazine, there was always a welcome hiatus when they left. Endless days and nights of chatter interspersed with endless cups of tea served in blue willow delft which for the rest of the year resided in my grandmother’s dresser, monotonous trip to the shop to get pounds of ham and tomatoes to create exotic summer salads all munched down between hundreds and hundreds of mentions of life ‘ovah.’

I reached a point when even my young mind just wanted it all to stop so that we could go back to a life where I didn’t have to always have my hair combed, where we ate proper dinners and not salads and where we could drink tay from mugs. Where we could say “ok folks, we’ve had our fun, let’s lay down the pretence on both sides and nobody gets hurt. We’ll take out the mugs we really drink from and you tell us the real story of ‘life ovah.’ And none of this ‘you’re part of the community’ rubbish.” Do ya read me, ovah?

Paddy wasn’t built for the sunshine...

Thu, Jul 25, 2013

Paddy wasn’t built for sunshine. You see, he never had much practice at it, despite he convincing himself that every summer of his childhood was spent on his back in the fields looking up at a sky with ne’er a cloud to be seen. With the sun-tanned shape of his Casio digital watch festooned like a white tattoo on his freckled arms, he told himself that this would be the best country in the world if the sun shone all the time. He says that he never noticed the wimmen of the country ‘til the sun shone and that he never appreciated the natural beauty of the countryside either. And when the rain and the winds came and they did come with earnest for the best part of a decade, he wished that the day would come when it would be warm in the morning and warm at night and that then all his ills would be cured.

A LAR is born...

Thu, Jul 11, 2013

I'd never heard of a LAR before this week, that is apart from Lar Corbett. I didn't know what it was, whether it was a he, a she or an it, or whether you could manage to eat a full one. And now this week, with the birds falling out of the trees with the sunburn and us driven to distraction by a boat full of millionaires holidaying alongside Mutton Island, Fianna Fail has decided to unleash the LARS on a generally unsuspecting public.

When will the blather machine ever run dry?

Thu, Jun 27, 2013

I don’t do sincerity very well. Don’t get me wrong, it‘s not a flaw or anything which gets me down, it’s just a conditioning, a layer that has applied itself to me since a long time back. There are days when I wish I was a very principled person, one who could be strongly committed to one cause of another. I encounter lots of people who strongly believe in a cause or a campaign and I lay the resources of my pages at their disposal and I admire them. But I’m not one of them. And because I’m afflicted with a latent lack of sincerity, I tend to get that little twitch in my nose when I detect similar insincerity, when I resist the temptation to have an almighty yawn and say to someone ‘save the bullshit for someone else.”

When will the blather machine ever run dry?

Thu, Jun 27, 2013

I don’t do sincerity very well. Don’t get me wrong, it‘s not a flaw or anything which gets me down, it’s just a conditioning, a layer that has applied itself to me since a long time back. There are days when I wish I was a very principled person, one who could be strongly committed to one cause of another. I encounter lots of people who strongly believe in a cause or a campaign and I lay the resources of my pages at their disposal and I admire them. But I’m not one of them. And because I’m afflicted with a latent lack of sincerity, I tend to get that little twitch in my nose when I detect similar insincerity, when I resist the temptation to have an almighty yawn and say to someone ‘save the bullshit for someone else.”

50 years since JFK, but it may as well be a hundred

Thu, Jun 20, 2013

Over the course of the next week, you will be regaled with anecdotes about the day the most famous man in the world came to Galway and how for one day, everything came to a standstill. And how the snapshots in our mind, whether they be colour or black and white were forever crystallised on those heady days and in the sad months that followed, as reality became legend and legend became myth.

Abuse is the new discourse

Thu, Jun 13, 2013

When Enda Kenny stood up in the Dail yesterday and outlined the amount of bile and hate that is coming his way courtesy of his stance on the abortion legislation, he was reflecting a reality that ensures abuse is now a new form of discourse, being seen instead as a quicker way of getting your point across than searching and struggling manfully for a burst of eloquence that may never arrive.

A nation stands shocked

Thu, May 30, 2013

When the children of Ireland were being abused and beaten in the industrial schools of this country for decades, it all happened in black and white. And because things happened in black and white, they seemed less real. Almost as if they have to be proven to have happened at all. The cameras were not there for those terrible deeds that happened to the vulnerable of this country up to not so long ago and so they did not have the same imprint on the mind if they would if they were captured on video for us to watch over and over again.

Don't take away our discretion

Thu, May 23, 2013

In the crazy world that exists after Shattergate and Minggate, we are in danger of losing something very precious. You can take away the house, the job, the fancy cars, our dignity, but please don't take away the one thing we Irish love in great big shovels full — our discretion. What would life be like if we all had to live by the rules? If we had to pay the exact penalty for every misdemeanour we do, if we had to do things exactly as they should be done. If that was to happen, we’d turn into Germans aware that anything we do wrong would be punished exactly as the rule says it should. Or we’d spend our lives making sure others did things the way they should. A regimental regime like that would not be Ireland.

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