Bradley Bytes – a sort of political column with Dara Bradley

Galway City East is probably the most diverse of the city’s three electoral wards.

Doughiska and Roscam have large populations of what we call the ‘new Irish’ who, up until the last local election, felt a bit detached from the political system and the local elected representatives who are supposed to represent them.

Fianna Fáil’s Alan Cheevers changed that. After he lost out on a Council seat in 2014, Cheesy Cheevers targeted the votes of migrants who made Galway City East their homes.

Five years later, the communities of Roscam and Doughiska rewarded Cheevers’ hard work with a seat.

At the time, he credited those two areas, and particularly their diverse communities, for his electoral success.

“People in the Doughiska and Roscam community got behind me. There are 42 nationalities there, who feel under-represented over the last number of years. It was important for me to get elected for the 7,500 people in those two areas,” he told the Tribune after triumphing in 2019.

Black Africans made up a significant portion of his support base. East Europeans, too.

He’ll be hoping to retain their support next year to retain his seat.

But he won’t have it all his own way. The Green Party has announced that Joyce Mathias, a Nigerian, will contest the election in City East next year.

A black woman, who immigrated to Ireland 20 years ago and sees Ireland as home, is aiming to become the first person of colour to be elected to City Hall.

According to the party, Joyce Mathias advocates for social justice here as well as her native country.

“Her humanitarian work in Nigeria includes visits to rural schools to motivate the students on benefits of education. She also visits the prisons to advocate for those wrongfully imprisoned.

“Here in Ireland she has fundraised for LauraLynn, Mater Foundation, Pieta House, Mental Health Ireland and Trócaire,” the Green Party said of the post-graduate of University of Galway who studied Strategy, Innovation and People Management.

Her entrance into the race could put pressure on Cheevers’ first preference votes among the African community.

But as a representative of that community, even Councillor Cheevers will acknowledge that a black African face on the ballot paper will make that ballot paper more representative of the area he represents.

(Photo: City Councillor Alan Cheevers (FF), with Joyce Mathias, Green Party candidate in City East (left) and the Nigerian Ambassador to Ireland, Ijeoma Obiezu, at the Cumasú Centre in Doughiska last week).
This is a shortened preview version of this column. For more Bradley Bytes, see the March 31 edition of the Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.

A Different View by Dave O’Connell

The first home I ever bought cost me £34,000; it was a brand new three-bed semi-detached bungalow in a new estate in the Cork city suburb of Rochestown.

Apart from the first-time house buyer’s grant of £2,000, I hadn’t a penny left for furniture or fittings, but what matter; there was enough in that for a decent bed, a spare bed, a wardrobe, white goods, two rooms’ worth of tintawn carpet, a cheap table and four chairs, and lino for the kitchen.

The excess kitchen lino was repurposed into a laminated patchworked quilt for the bathroom, and the carpet offcuts were sufficient to make a narrow pathway to the front door that looked like the grass growing in the middle of a boreen.

There was no cash for curtains or armchairs – never mind a three piece suite – but none of that took from the sense of pride of owning your own home, even if 90 per cent of it was actually the property of AIB.

That feeling, I fear, won’t be a familiar one to the current generation – or indeed the ones already older than I was when I forked out for my first house in 1992.

Back then, this was the rule rather than the exception; everyone started a job and a few years later they bought a house. Eventually they even managed the curtains.

My plunge into the curtain market came after I’d borrowed a lone old armchair from friends of mine so I’d have somewhere to sit while watching the telly – I’d bought that before the house – without having to get into the lotus position on the concrete floor.

This meant tuning in with the lights off because otherwise you’d look like you were trying to draw attention to yourself through the front windows.

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.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Inside Track with John McIntyre

LITTLE did we think that when Galway and Mayo fought out an absorbing draw in the opening round of the National League at MacHale Park last January that the great Connacht rivals would end up contesting the Division One final at Croke Park on Sunday.

And there is no fluke about the all-Western showdown either as Galway and Mayo have been the country’s two most consistent top-tier footballing forces this spring. The greater hype has been about Mayo, especially with a new manager Kevin McStay in tow, but the Tribesmen’s form has been just as compelling.

Game management, especially when clinging onto leads down the home stretch, has been an issue for Galway over the past couple of years. Even in that game in Castlebar a couple of months ago, Padraic Joyce’s team let a winning hand slip when carelessly giving away possession. A subsequent loss at home to Roscommon had some natives wondering if the great progress of 2022 had suddenly stalled.

Since then, however, Galway have been holding their nerve in tight matches, notably the last two, away to Armagh and against Kerry at Pearse Stadium last Sunday. Their players may have learned the hard way, but Seán Kelly and company no longer appeared flustered or prone to unforced errors when in sight of the winning post.

Beating Kerry at any time is a good day’s work, especially in a game when you lead from the off but are never so far ahead as to be entirely comfortable. Three times in the second-half, the All-Ireland champions cut the margin to a solitary point, but on each occasion the home team came up with the answers.

Given their extraordinary exploits in last year’s All-Ireland final, you would have struggled to find a bookmaker pre-match who would have laid long odds on both Shane Walsh and David Clifford failing to raise a flag from play between them. Clifford, in particular, was out of sorts, spurning chances and giving the ball away more than once. He looked battle-weary.

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.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.