A Different View

Going is good and well but there’s no place like home

Published

9 years ago

June 12, 2014

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Why do we invest so much money and energy in our houses – and then, at the drop of a hat, we lock them up so that we can go away on holidays to somewhere else? Even more so when that somewhere else has none of the comforts of home, and we spend hours, if not days, laden down with our worldly possessions so that we can have some of those home comforts when we get there?

Of course for those who owe the price of a small South American country on their homes, the whole point of a holiday is that they get away from the very thing that’s dragging them down for the other 50 weeks of the year.

And for most people, there is the desire for discovery, to see different places and experience how the other half lives.

But when you turn all of this on its head, there are millions of holidaymakers who have paid, well, millions to come to Galway on their holidays – and we’re here already.

It’s not as though we’re living in some sewer pit – but still the first thing we do when we get the chance is to pack our bags and vamoose.

You only have to look at the American or Japanese tourists stopping en mass to take photographs of our shop windows, to realise that we don’t appreciate what’s on our own doorstep.

And it’s when you stop too and look at the world through their eyes that you suddenly see the beauty that was there all along – the medieval streets, Galway Bay, Connemara, the Aran Islands…rugged natural beauty with a cosmopolitan soul at its core.

But this isn’t just an ode to Galway; no matter where we live, we always seem to think that our holidays would be better off spent somewhere else.

So families vacate a perfectly fine dwelling with heating, electricity, cooking facilities and feather beds to that they can squash into a canvass tent where they will sleep on half an inch of mat.

They will be no washing facilities but there may well be water – the kind that arrives as rain and flows freely through the supposedly waterproof cover over your head.

There will be no cooking facilities except a small burner that wouldn’t warm a gnat let alone cook sausages in the Irish summer.

Or there’s the caravan park where you marvel at the fact that the kids can’t fall out of their bed in their mobile home – because it’s wedged firmly between the walls on either side.

And who knew you could turn a dining table into a sleeping facility or that there was theoretically room for grown adults to in the space over the driver’s cab in a camper van?

Others will jet off to sunspots where they will roast like turkeys on Christmas morning, shoehorned into apartments where the definition of success is English-speaking CNN on the telly and balancing the need for air conditioning with the desire for something quieter than a cement mixer producing it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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Dressed-down street cred helps get message across

Published

3 days ago

March 23, 2023

Dave O'Connell

Dave O'Connell

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Journalists, for the most part, will never win awards for their sartorial elegance; the traditional image is less of a person in a well-fitted bespoke suit and more a bloke with the racing pages stuffed into a bulging pocket of a jacket that wouldn’t look out of place buried in a hedge.

The exception has traditionally been television where a suit and tie or a dry-cleaned top would be the norm, unless you’re in a war zone where a helmet and flak jacket with PRESS on the front of it are the outfits of choice.

It’s not that we’re badly dressed as a profession, but it’s more the geography teacher image – clean jeans and a work shirt or jumper – than the cocktail party look. And because we don’t have to appear on a small screen before the nation, that’s just grand.

But you don’t see newsreaders in jeans and a tee-shirt – although some apparently might have shorts on out of camera shot – and television reporters on the road could usually make the switch from their day job to a wine bar without going home for a change of clothes.

This dress code doesn’t just apply to journalism of course; the Dáil used to strictly enforce the shirt and tie rule for male politicians until Tony Gregory arrived on the scene with his Dublin inner city street cred and open-neck shirt to make it all a tad more casual.

Then Mick Wallace came along and went full-tramp, with unkempt locks and pink tee-shirts that all look like a white one that ran with a red one in the wash. And suddenly, you have a whole left-wing cohort without a tie to their name between them.

So the rules were relaxed in the corridors of power – and now the BBC is breaking its age-old rules on dress code too….in an effort to seem more authentic and relevant in this social media era.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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Connacht Tribune

Time and a place for togs – and it’s not in a snowstorm

Published

1 week ago

March 16, 2023

Dave O'Connell

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Paul Mescal has a lot to answer for – and it’s nothing to do with his Oscar nights or his antics in Normal People.

No, it’s his propensity to wear sports shorts completely out of context and season – football togs, in old money – because he has inspired a nation of copycats.

Everywhere you look there are fellas out on freezing nights in O’Neill’s togs – frequently set off with white ankle socks and sometimes even sliders – as though they were wandering back from the beach for an hour on a sun bed beside the pool, instead of coping with the freezing temperatures sent down here from the Arctic.

Last Thursday night was the coldest night of the year and only an eejit would go out without a big coat, gloves and a hat.

Indeed you could argue that only an eejit would go out at all, but at least we were on our way to a play – so that was a good excuse given that we’d spend the night in out of the cold.

There we were, wrapped up like Eskimos and edging gingerly through the sleet along the Salmon Weir Bridge when who should be happen upon?

A fella in a sweatshirt and football togs as though this was a sun-kissed evening stolen from July.

Perhaps these hardy boys look on with the same sense of astonishment at us wearing four layers, hat and gloves – but you don’t have to have spent time in medical school to know that you don’t die from sweating.

And yet funnily they don’t even look all that cold. They’re not rushing anywhere fast to get warm; they’re just strolling around like superstar footballers who just bought the place.

Their only concession to this being March in Ireland and not Marbella in August is the said sweatshirt they’re wearing over their tee-shirt to stave off complete hypothermia.

Ironically – and this is only from personal experience – as soon as they go home to the old pair’s gaff for the weekend, the first thing they do is hit the central heating so they can shed the oul’ sweatshirt and chill, but not be chilly because the boiler is burning away for all it’s worth.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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Connacht Tribune

Funerals offer chance to reflect on lives well lived

Published

2 weeks ago

March 9, 2023

Dave O'Connell

Dave O'Connell

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It’s a strange thing to go to a funeral when you don’t really know the deceased – because, when you take the personal grief and loss out of the equation, it leaves you just to absorb the joy in enjoying someone’s life on their departure.

That’s not to make light of the sadness suffered by close friends and family members; I’ve been that soldier too and I know that there is little or no consolation in the fact that they left a positive impression on so many.

That won’t come until after you’ve had time to mourn.

But when you’re there because you know one of the family and you just want to offer them a little support in their sadness, you discover you’re finding out about the life and legacy of the deceased after the fact.

It’s like reading an obituary of someone you never met, because when a person is painted in such a positive light, you’re only regret is that you didn’t know them.

All funerals are sad, because someone that friends and family held dear is now gone. If you have faith, they’re gone to a better place – and if you don’t, then it’s just the end.

But either way, it means you won’t see that person again – and there are few more heartrending moments in life than lowering a loved one into the cold earth.

And yet when you take that awful heartbreak out of the equation because you didn’t know the person in the first place, it is what funerals are supposed to be – a celebration of life.

You hear family members and friends tell stories – and often funny stories – of the dead person’s life; you realise how loved and highly regarded they were by those who knew them best – and you think, that’s not a bad legacy after all.

They don’t have to be well-known because the best lives are often ordinary lives; someone who just did their job, reared their family, loved their grandchildren, enjoyed a pint or a bet and bothered nobody to any great extent in their corner of the world.

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.