It's Easter week and the flowers are blooming all around us. The last two year offered considerable challenges in terms of how we tackled the spread of coronavirus, and now with infection figures going in the right direction, society is looking forward to a normal spring and summer when we can meet friends, support our local businesses, get back to work, resume a semblance of responsible normality — and there is no better place to sample all of this than here in Galway.
Galway is extending a welcome hand to you all in the weeks and months ahead and we encourage you all to accept and do your bit to help Galway recover from a difficult time.
Everybody is energised and ready for the months ahead, because the Galway year is like that, a set series of events and happenings that in their own way frame the seasons for the city. Galway has always been a coming together of ideals and imperfections, a pot pourri of dreams and ambitions and realities that when chucked into the blender along with a few accordions and organic vegetables creates a sense of a city that attracts people from far and wide.
And whatever essence this sense of a city lets off, it is a magical elixir that defines us all as being players in a city with a unique identity.
Over the past years, we have shown that we had the collective will to help our neighbours and friends, to keep everyone safe and happy in the face of the health challenges that dominated the year.
And so we extol Galway with a great pride, Galway the city and county, and Galway the feeling. We tell people they have to sample it, partly to see if they will enjoy it and partly to convince ourselves that we haven't just imagined it all along.
There is no place in Ireland quite like Galway, even for those of us who have lived here all our lives, or who have been blow-ins for decades or just days. No more than any other city, there is a sort of invisible inscription on the pavements that reads to all of us 'you could be happy here.' or here is your type of place."
It is a place without pretentiousness which aims to hold court with a sense of its own uniqueness and characteristic imperfection. And so this sort of Galwayness permeates every sense of ourself.
A Galway way
There is a Galway way about how we live. Our centre streets at weekends are performing spaces for buskers and retailers. Even our politicians have a Galwayness about them, a sort of joie de vivre or madness that encapsulates and infuriates in equal measure. Their numbers contains rogues and poets and storytellers and ecowarriors — our type of people.
So if this magical formula is so precious, why don't we keep it for ourselves. Shut the doors and savour it just for ourselves. We don't do this, because we want this community to prosper, to set ideals for itself so that it becomes even more more inclusive and welcoming, in order for the pot pourri to maintain the right shades and smells.
We believe that Galway has to tell others about this need to be sustainable because the spirit is very much in keeping with the Advertiser's Buy Local ethos which states that by keeping your business in your community, you will be keeping your community in business.
It is this community spirit that will stand to us in the face of the challenges in the weeks ahead. Be smart, be respectful and look out for one another and help regorw the place that we love and care for.
Whether it is in the villages of the county, or the larger towns, or the city itself, it is important that we all play our role in helping our local communities to survive and to prosper at this difficult time.
We all have spending power, whether large or small, and it is our economic future, and that of our families, our friends, and our neighbours on whom our spending will impact directly. So let us take the opportunity to support each other, to promote our communities and to spend locally, which will ultimately be to the benefit of us all.
And so the sense of Galway is with us as soon as we land in this city. It is a pulsating, beating heart to which our feet follow the beat. Enjoy the city and county this Spring.
