Power of leisure 

The quarterly report of the organising librarian of the Carnegie Libraries for County Galway makes interesting reading inasmuch as it reveals the progress made in nine months and gives some general idea of the class of literature our people like.

The great need in the rural areas of Ireland is a properly directed and controlled social life that will give people the opportunity of meeting their neighbours on equal terms, under pleasant conditions; healthy recreation that will give them an interest; a local pride in their prowess at games; a greater zest for work; instruction and reading that will open for them a wider horizon and afford very real pleasure.

Given these conditions, we should have less resort to emigration, much discontent would disappear, the mental outlook of our people would be brightened and broadened.

Absence of occupation is not rest, and it is necessary that our people should have some profitable pleasure during their leisure hours. There are 73 Carnegie centres in Co. Galway to-day, with 6,544 volumes in circulation, while 5,920 volumes are in stock in the central repository, and 7,500 remain to be purchased.

Over fifteen hundred readers have been registered, this including 476 juveniles.

Pictured: Members of the committee of the Ballinderreen Community Centre photographed at the opening of the centre on November 7, 1975. Seated, from left: Margaret Sweeney, Agnes O’Connor, Secretary, Very Rev Canon Thomas Walsh, PP, Mary Anne Gill, Gerard Sheehan and Eileen Larkin. Standing: Peter Coen, John Farnham, Christopher Flannery, Jim Morrissey, Paddy Donohoe, Paddy O’Connor, Joe O’Connor, Martin Coen and Michael Kelly.