Connacht Tribune
Galway In Days Gone By
1919
State of the asylum
At the monthly meeting of the Ballinasloe Asylum Committee of Management held on Monday the Most Rev. Dr. O’Doherty, Bishop of Clonfert, presided. Other members present were: Rev. Fr. Brennan, Messrs. J. Millar, T. J. O’Brien, T. Martin, A. Derivan, T. P. Killeen, J. McKeige.
The Resident Medical Superintendent reported that the health of the institution was fairly satisfactory; there was one case of enteric fever.
The staff in the institution was to some extent discontented with his interpretation of the fifty-six hour week. It was for the committee to define exactly the terms. He took it to mean as the necessity of duty permits.
One patient was given permission to attend the Horse Show and he failed to return; it was technically an escape.
There were 1,417 patients in the asylum. As compared with 1,422 in 1918 and 1,399 in 1917.
Cool heads required
Proclamations, hunger strikes, daily suppressions, courtsmartial. Thus is Ireland governed. The people have need to keep cool and think with clarity.
The operation of Carsonism in Kildare-street Club, in the star chambers of Dublin Castle, in the secret rooms of the Cabinet, overthrew Constitutionalism, and rushed the country into the Rebellion of 1916.
On Wednesday, Sir Edward Carson’s chief Galloper, now exalted to the woolsack, came to Ireland “upon an official visit,” but none the less as a member of the Cabinet Committee that is setting about the congenial task of dishonouring the King’s Signature upon the Statute Book, and ensuring that the Peace Treaty shall not apply to Ireland.
Forty Irishmen are hunger-striking in Mountjoy because the undertaking given by Mr. Duke that political prisoners should be treated in a class by themselves, not as criminals, has been shamelessly betrayed.
Six of them have already been removed to hospital, and nine have been released under the Cat-and-Mouse Act.
The official Sinn Féin Press has been most thoroughly supressed. At a time when it is urgently necessary that men who hold by Sinn Féin should have the benefit of restraining leadership, this influence for restraint has been ruthlessly removed.
Can we wonder if in such an atmosphere malicious injuries pile up until the unfortunate ratepayers wince under a burden over which they can have no control and which is the natural outcome of five years of deliberate misgovernment and exasperation?
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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The nurses’ union has formally urged the Chief Fire Officer to investigate 17 alleged breaches of the fire regulations as a result of chronic overcrowding in the emergency department at University Hospital Galway.
It’s the second time the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has done so since Christmas, fearing the lives of staff and patients are being put in grave danger.
The emergency department was busier than normal last week, with between 222 and 251 patients turning up to be seen per day. On Wednesday of last week there were 53 patients waiting on trolleys, according to figures released by the Saolta Hospital group. That went down to 47 on Thursday and Friday.
This week has seen little let up. On Monday and Tuesday the number of people who could only get a trolley was down to 36 and 38 respectively.
Local area representative of the INMO, Anne Burke, said as a result of very high attendances at the temporary emergency department, management had opened a transit area where between 12 and 14 people could be accommodated in cubicles.
Get the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.
If you Google Damien Comer, the first entry the search returns is a dedicated Wikipedia page, which declares: “He’s better than David Clifford”.
And while Wikipedia as a source of fact isn’t necessarily always reliable, who are we to argue with it?
But whatever about comparisons with Kerry greats, the Annaghdown clubman is certainly up there among Galway’s finest ever footballers.
Winning a first All-Star last season, from his third nomination, was proof of that. It was a special personal accolade, but he’d trade it in a shot for a Celtic Cross.
“It was nice to get but if I finish my career not having won an All-Ireland, I’ll be very disappointed,” he declared.
Comer hints that the 2022 All-Ireland final loss to Kerry last July was not one of his better games in maroon, and it’s one he thinks about regularly.
“Yeah, I would yeah, I’d think about it a bit. But I try to forget it as well, because it wasn’t a good day for me, personally, anyway.
“You try to forget about it and yet you have to try to learn from it and improve on the mistakes you made, and stuff you didn’t do that you should’ve done, and different things that you can bring to this season.
“It’s one that’s hard to forget about really because we were there for so long. Sixty minutes in, neck-and-neck, and then they just pulled away, so it was disappointing,” he said.
Damien Comer has teamed up with Specsavers to encourage people to take a more proactive approach to their eye and hearing health. There’s a full interview with him ahead of Sunday’s National Football League Final, is in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.
Galway businessman Paul Grealish remembers the moment back in 2000 when he was given a sheet of paper and asked to write about his life. He was on weekend-long self-development course that he’d been sent on by his brother John. At the time, John was managing director of their family business for which Paul and their sister, Joan, also worked.
“The course was probably done in an attempt to make it easier to manage me,” says Paul with a laugh, adding that he “was tough to manage” back then.
He was enjoying the course – until he received that blank sheet.
“I got about four or five sentences in, writing about my early life. Until I got to the primary school part . . . I was in tears,” he remembers. “I was so used to compartmentalising things, I didn’t see the danger.”
In the early 1970s, aged nine and ten years, Paul had been beaten and sexually abused by his teacher, Brother Thomas Caulfield, at Tuam CBS primary school.
He had repressed those memories for nearly three decades.
“You bury the memory, and you bury it as deep as you can. There’s an awareness of something terrible there but it’s too frightening for you to actively remember.”
Paul was so terrified of those memories that he’d lost all recollection of his childhood. He couldn’t tell his story.
He was meant to show it to one of the course leaders – a counsellor, he thinks. Instead, Paul put the nearly-blank sheet before the man and explained what had happened.
Realising Paul’s plight, that man gave him a list of phone numbers for counsellors in Galway.
“Every now and again, I’d look at it and think about ringing them but I didn’t,” Paul says.
However, the abuse that had robbed Paul of his childhood and blighted his adulthood with feelings of guilt and self-hatred refused to stay buried. Finally, he knew he had to deal with it. That journey began in the early 2000s and Paul finally got closure earlier this month when Caulfield was sentenced to 27 months in prison – with the final seven suspended – for his crime.
Read Paul’s full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.
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