Country Living

A joyous welcome for the arrival of that ‘happy day’

Published

2 years ago

March 25, 2021

Francis Farragher

A time to embrace the season of light. Photo: Joe O'Shaughnessy.

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m pretty unashamed . . . and maybe a tad repetitive too . . . about what my favourite day of the year is, and has been, for many decades now. It’s always been that last Sunday in March when the clocks change and the evening sunset lazily stretches its reach. With just one turn of the clock handle, our sunset springs forward to around the 8pm mark, and the very real lure is there to go outside and do something in the open air of the late evening.

Like the rest of the population, I’ve found this to have been one long and hard Winter, even if our weather wasn’t particularly severe. True, it was a fair bit wetter than average since last October, but in terms of extreme events like raging storms or great freeze-ups, the past few months haven’t been so bad at all.

But yet, it’s a Winter that has seemed to go on forever. We no sooner had Christmas ‘promised to us’ by the powers that be, than we were roundly scolded for being too bold, leading to Surge 3 of the dreaded coronavirus. The inevitable lockdown followed and January – never my favourite month – just seemed to go on forever.

Like the story of the little boy trying to walk to school on the slippy road, going two steps backwards for every one forward, we just don’t seem to have gotten any breaks from our battle with ‘The Covid’.

We (Ireland and the EU) were months behind the Brits in getting the vaccines rolled out; deliveries never seemed to arrive on schedule and still don’t; and our mood seems to have worsened every time we hear that huge swathes of the population of Northern Ireland will be vaccinated while we lurch around the 5% to 10% mark. Not bedrudgery . . . just a sense that we’re being left behind. Without a shred of a doubt, the UK left the EU ‘sitting’ when it came to the vaccine strategy. Is it any wonder that there’s no humour on us?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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Country Living

Mini moans but still a tonic as ‘summer time’ says hello

Published

2 days ago

March 30, 2023

Francis Farragher

The season of light has arrived to our shores.

Country Living with Francis Farragher

As one ‘shoves on’ in life, there tends to be an increasing attendance at anniversary masses of friends and family — at the back of the mind, there’s always the nagging feeling at such occasions, that you’ve moved up in the queue.

Regardless of the intensity of one’s religious fever though — or the lack of it — there is always something special about remembering the passing of a loved one: gone but not forgotten, is probably the best way to sum it.

The great and warming tradition of the chat with neighbours after the preacher has finishing his words still persists, and especially so across rural Ireland, and inevitably the conversation seems to switch to the weather.

Last Sunday morning as I walked out from Brooklodge Church in Ballyglunin — a lovely little prayer place nestled in one corner of the old Blake estate — I was reminded that I shouldn’t have praised February too much over recent weeks, as March was always waiting in the wings to deal with such buds of early spring optimism.

The theme of the advice was to never count your chickens before they hatch, because if we enjoyed a good spell of weather in the late-winter, early-spring period, nature’s scales would soon balance things out. There were also murmurs too about the price of bales of silage.

For those of you not of a rural hue, these are essentially big bales of grass wrapped up in plastic to preserve them, a commodity you couldn’t ‘give away’ in February as we all looked forward to an ‘early spring’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.

Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.

Country Living

From pagan to Christian and all brought about by a young ‘Brit’

Published

2 weeks ago

March 16, 2023

Francis Farragher

Country Living with Francis Farragher

The wheel of time continues to spin at a frantic pace with St. Patrick’s Day coming hot on the heels of our Christmas festival as we prepare to celebrate the life and times of our patron saint.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig is of course celebrated in many countries across the globe reflecting the grimmer economic times of Ireland through the 1800s and early part of the 20th century when thousands had to take the emigrant boat or plane to better themselves.

The story of St. Patrick is of course well documented both in history and legend – like most things of Irish hue, the life and times of our patron saint weren’t simple.

Patrick wasn’t Irish, being born into a wealthy enough English family, and as well as that, he’s not even a ‘proper saint’ of the Catholic Church, the latter ‘anomaly’ arising, due to the times he lived in, when there wasn’t a proper canonisation process in place.

Those little matters aside, Patrick continues to hold a special place in our hearts, even if the timing of his feast day can often coincide with spells of dodgy early spring weather while it also occurs before the clocks change into their summertime hours.

For all that, it was still a very welcome break for those of us, who back the years, didn’t have the same grá for school as the pupils of 2023.

We all received the usual history lesson about the life and times of Patrick in the run-up to March 17, as we were reminded of how he transformed our pagan ways into more Christian rituals. And it would be nice to think that we never looked back after that!

There were too the customary searches for shamrock whether it be in fields at the back of the school or on the family farm while the more affluent (everything being relative) pupils tended to wear green badges with harps attached on the big day.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.

Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.

Country Living

A time in our lives that none of us will ever forget

Published

3 weeks ago

March 9, 2023

Francis Farragher

Some very sad times during Covid.

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It is kind of strange how major events of this world act as memory markers for us. From an Irish context, there’s the Great Famine of the 1840s, the 1916 Rising, the World Wars, and of late the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And of course there’s the ‘big one’ – that time in our lives when the word Covid entered our vocabulary and we found ourselves freewheeling into a world of restrictions that just a few weeks before their introduction would have been unimaginable.

There are also little incidental chats about when something happened or how long such-a-one has been dead which ends with the inevitable question: “Was it before or after the Covid?”

It’s easy too of course with the benefit of hindsight to look back at the raft of restrictions which were piled on top of us ordinary ‘God fearing’ people, such as not being able to travel more than three miles from our homes and having to have paperwork in your car to present at Garda checkpoints on the way to and from work.

We all hated the concept of the €9 meal if you wanted to have a pint in the local or the hassle of having to put on your face mask every time you move from your desk at work . . . but there were a lot worse things going on too.

I remember chatting to friends in the earlier and more draconian phases of the Covid restrictions who had been unable to visit parents in nursing homes as their loved ones entered the final days of their lives.

This was all brought into focus over the past week or so by a former member of NPHET (remember that, the National Public Health Emergency Team), Professor Martin Cormican at the University of Galway.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.

Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.