1925

Opening new worlds

It would be little short of a tragedy if our county administrators had failed to strike a rate for the maintenance of the Carnegie Library in the county. The Council demurred at the outset, but wiser counsels prevailed and the library is now an established institution in our midst.

The Galway Urban Council has followed in the footsteps of the premier county body, and at the last monthly meeting decided to adopt the Libraries’ Act. To the booklover in Galway, the library will open up new worlds.

The debt man owes to the great minds of former days is incalculable. They have guided him in truth. They have filled his mind with noble and graceful images. They have stood by him in all his vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude.

Time guides on; fortunate is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds which seem insoluble are daily sundered by interest, by evolution or by caprice: McCauley tells us that no such cause can affect the silent converse we hold with the highest human intellects. These are old friends, never seen with new faces, the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity.

1950

Telephone demand

The railway strike and the disruption it has created not alone in rail transport but in postal services has caused an abnormally heavy demand on the telephone system this Christmas.

The Post Office has never experienced such pressure on the service as that which has taken place during the past week.

One must make allowances for the problems created by the emergency situation that the strike has caused, but anyone who has experience of the telephone system throughout Connacht can make no allowances for the failure of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to provide a reasonably prompt and efficient telephone system for normal times.

Galway Telephone Exchange is a case in point. The night and day staffs – whose efficiency and courtesy are beyond question – are crowded into a small room to work at antiquated instruments that have a totally inadequate number of trunk connections extending out from it.

The conditions under which the staff have to work to show that the Department have as little consideration for their own workers as they have for the general public here in the West.

Pictured: CHILD’S PLAY: Thomas Walshe, Father Burke Road, Fairhill, Patrick Corbett, Costello Road, Shantalla, and Theresa Small, Castlegar, looking at a selection of Christmas toys on a counter in December 1963.