A €1.4 MILLION research project headed up by the University of Galway [UG] will be at the cutting edge of technology aimed at reducing methane emissions from Irish cattle.

The Methane Abatement in Grazing Systems (MAGS) will focus on potential methane reduction solutions in relation to animal feeds, breeding and manure management [essentially slurry].

Teagasc, the Dept. of Agriculture, the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation and the Northern Ireland based Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) will be working with scientists from UG on the project.

Funding for MAGS is being provided by the Dept. of Agriculture with the Minister of State, Martin Heydon, saying last week that the financial commitment was an indication of the department’s ambition to reduce agri-methane emissions.

“The MAGS project will focus on further developing technologies, including methane inhibitors and breeding strategies, for application in beef and dairy pasture-based systems to mitigate animal and manure methane,” said Minister Heydon.

Ireland is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by 25% between now and 2030 with ‘novel methane reduction technologies’ expected to play a key role in that cut.

Dr. Sinéad Waters – Teagasc and University of Galway – who is the project co-ordinator of MAGS, said that agriculture was Ireland’s oldest and largest indigenous industry but it now faced ‘a major challenge’ in  meeting the 2030 methane reduction target of 25%.

“Strategies to mitigate methane emissions related to cattle and sheep need to be rapidly developed and implemented on farm to comply with these targets.

Pictured: Members of the research teams involved in the Methane Abatement in Grazing Systems project (MAGS) pictured with (front centre), President of the University of Galway,  Professor Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh; along with (left) Dr Sinéad Waters, Project Co-ordinator; and (right) David Kenny, Teagasc Researcher. PHOTO: Aengus McMahon. 

Health, Beauty and Lifestyle with Denise McNamara

We may not have the chance to get much wear out of our summer wardrobe yet – I still have not reverted to daily sandals – but we can live in hope the weather picks up now July has hit. The shops are awash with light gear, which they will soon have to start discounting if the temperatures don’t pick up. If you are still hoping to pick up a few bits for holidays – or for a staycation – here are the biggest trends to look out for Summer ’24.

Is it the global obsession with Taylor Swift that has the designers championing a country & western look this season as she did after all start out in Nashville and many of greatest hits have a decidedly country feel.

Many of the dresses and tops have a prairie feel, with suede, crochet and fringed waistcoats are a real feature. Cowboy boots under long, frilly and floral dresses are having a moment, replacing the very prevalent biker look of the last few years.

White long dresses with oversized ruffles and floral motifs were to be seen across all the catwalks for the Spring Summer 24 collections in Milan, New York and Paris, which have been borrowed enthusiastically on the High Street.

They are easy to wear, as you can pair them with a denim jacket and large belt to dress them down.

White is again a particular favourite if you are in the market for a suit – the jacket and loose trouser combo which is not going away is a great option for a summer wedding or party.

A lot of the designers are returning to an understated luxury look in their collections and white, beige, cream are a strong element in their offerings.

While logos are no longer used as statements of social status, minimalistic pieces in mute colours and patterns are evidence of this so-called ‘rich look’ which is all over TikTok.

A group of artists of all ages who’ve been friends since first meeting at art college in the city nine years ago, are showing their work at the city’s Westside Library as part of this year’s Westside Arts Festival. Galway Reinterpreted is one of two exhibitions from the busy Nova Collective, who will open a second show in Oughterard Courthouse this Friday evening. Hugh Murphy and Deirdre Crowley of the group tell BERNIE Ní FHLATHARTA how democracy and friendship is at the heart of everything they do.

Imagine a pink Galway Cathedral, or the former oil tanks at the docks seen through different coloured lens, or even Quay Street dappled in neon shades.

Well, you don’t have to imagine it, as these are just some of the images featuring in two new exhibitions from the Nova Art Collective – one has just opened in the Westside Library, the other will open this Friday in The Courthouse in Oughterard.

Nova are a group of artists who graduated from ATU/GMIT in 2019. They got on so well after four years in college together that they’ve remained in touch since, putting on an exhibition annually, except for the pandemic year of 2020.

There’s 45 years between the youngest and the oldest member and all get on famously.

Their group exhibitions have mostly been held in the city but they’ve shown in the county as well, with one particularly successful one in Kinvara.

The only male in the group is Hugh Murphy, a former businessman in the city –  he and his wife Carmel ran Comma Print in Middle Street for years before the rising cost of rates and overheads led them close the shop ten years ago.

Since then Hugh, as a mature student, has taken a number of courses –  all art-related – and is considering starting another one this September!

Deirdre Crowley, a former bank official, now a textile artist, explains that Hugh is the gel that keeps Nova together as he’s a great organiser and the ‘daddy’ of the group.

Deirdre might well be the ‘mammy’ then, as Hugh explains she has a great input into organising the annual exhibitions. Meeting them in a cosy corner of Rouge café in Dominick Street on a wet morning last week certainly brightened up the day.

Seeing bubbly Deirdre, with a flair for colourful attire, alongside the impeccably dressed, quieter Hugh, it’s clear the pair work well together. Both are passionate about their art and are keen to ensure they and all the group members get opportunities to show and sell their work.

And work it is, enjoyable as it is at times. It took Deirdre at least 60 hours to complete her Cathedral piece, which she hand-embroidered using pink and cream threads.

The beautifully completed work shows off the iconic Galway building at its brightest best. It’s reinterpreted as being built with Galway granite, which has a pink sheen, instead of what was used — grey limestone.

Galway Reinterpreted is the name of this year’s group show in the city but that isn’t necessarily the theme, and it wasn’t a directive to the members, as Hugh and Deirdre explain.

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates. . .were it not for the shadows, there would be no beauty,” says Hugh quoting from the poem, In Praise of Shadows by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki.

Hugh thought Galway Reinterpreted could work on “both a literal and metaphorical level”, quickly adding that he’s not a dictator and that it was up to individual artists to choose their pieces for the show.

Deirdre concurs: “We are a very democratic group and it’s all about encouraging and motivating one another. People interpret art in different ways. The name of an exhibition is often just a guideline, not necessarily telling people what the art is about.”

Pictured: Hugh Murphy and Deirdre Crowley of the NOVA Contemporary Art Collective. Photo: Brian Harding.

1924

Prison for poteen

At Galway District Court on Monday, the story of an exciting chase after three men engaged in the traffic of poteen was related to District Court Justice Gleeson, when Patrick O’Malley, Carraroe, was charged with illegal possession of illicitly distilled spirit.

Sergeant King said that on June 28, accompanied by two guards, he lay in wait at Ballinacourty pier at 3 a.m. for a Connemara boat, which he suspected of carrying a cargo of poteen.

The boat arrived shortly after three o’clock. Witness saw here men take three kegs from underneath some turf in the boat, and they stepped ashore with the kegs. Witness came out of his hiding place, and on seeing him, the three men ran.

The guards pursued two of them, and witness pursued the third, the accused, who jumped from the pier into the turf boat. Witness also jumped into the boat before O’Malley had time to put out to sea and arrested him. The other two men succeeded in making their escape.

Mr. O’Dea, solr. for the defence, said O’Malley was on his way to look for work in Athenry, and the owners of the boat gave him a seat from Carraroe. It was usual for men of O’Malley’s type to leave the rock-bound districts to seek work in the rich inland parts of the county.

The justice, in sentencing O’Malley to one month’s imprisonment and fining him £30 or another two months, said that these people were very poor and had to migrate from Connemara to the rich inland parts of the county was no palliation of the offence.

Pictured: Mayor of Galway, Cllr Fintan Coogan, with the ‘Rose’ finalists during the Oranmore Galway Shawl Festival on July 15, 1988.

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Seven artists from across Ireland are showing their work in When We Cease to Understand the World, at Interface Inagh, located in Recess as part of this year’s Arts Festival.

The group exhibition from Clare Langan, Clodagh Emoe, Kate Fahey, Jo Killalea, Kathryn Maguire, Sarah Ellen Lundy and Vanya Lambrecht-Ward, takes its cue from the unique setting of Interface – a studio and residency programme in Conamara’s Inagh Valley.

The Interface site, which dates from the 1980s, was originally designed as the world’s biggest and most advanced salmon hatchery – supplying offshore salmon farmers with smolt via helicopter. However, the enterprise eventually failed, because the hatchery was built too high above the adjacent lake which it depended on for water.

According to Alannah Robins of Interface, its failure “represents the scale of human ambition and its lack of understanding or disregard for the natural surroundings”.

But, nurtured by her, the space at Interface Inagh has now become an extraordinary centre for artistic practices. For this Arts Festival show, the seven artists explore the disconnect between people and nature, but they also look at the potential of renewal. Through film, painting, sculpture and installation, the artists invite viewers to reflect on humanity’s relationships with nature, to look back to old practices, to learn about a place and sit within its geology and deep time and, finally, to connect with each other and the natural world.

Pictured: An image from Clare Langan’s installation, The Rewilding.

A MASSIVE Garda operation this week, which involved searches at three Galway locations, targeted a large gang that are understood to be involved in drugs, shootings, as well as petrol bomb and arson attacks over the past year.

The Garda early-morning swoops took place in Tuam, Moycullen and Galway city shortly after 6am on Monday morning last involving a number of police units.

Operation Trinomial – targeting organised crime gangs across Galway city and county – has resulted in a financial ‘hit’ against the gang on Monday, understood to be around €1.2 million.

Two bank accounts – one in Ireland and the other outside of the country – were frozen as a result of the operation, involving a total of €995,000.

One of the accounts had a crypto currency total of €530,000 and the other contained €465,000 in cash. In one of the house searches, a sum of €75,000 in cash was seized. Three vehicles – a VW Tiguan jeep, an Audi A5 car and a Ford Transit van – were also seized by Gardaí from the Divisional Crime, Drugs, Search, Dog Unit and National Criminal Bureau who took part in the operation.

Garda Detective Superintendent, Shane Cummins, told the Connacht Tribune that Monday’s operation was part of the ongoing campaign to tackle organised crime across the city and county.

“The target of this particular operation were the receipts of organised crime and it yielded well over one million euro.

“This is just part of the ongoing operations and we expect that arrests will also be made over the coming weeks,” said Det. Supt. Cummins.

Caption: Some of the good seized by Gardaí in Galway in this week’s crackdown.

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.

Galway delegates were part of the nationwide hospitality lobby lobbying last week to urge the Government to reinstate the nine per cent VAT rate on food services

Appealing on behalf of hospitality businesses ‘the length and breadth of the country’, they said it was essential that last September’s VAT increase be revisited in the upcoming Budget given the severe impact it is having on hospitality businesses – many of which are facing enormous financial pressures.

The demand came in a joint statement from the chief executives of the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation, Restaurants Association of Ireland, Vintners Federation of Ireland, Irish Hotels Federation and Licensed Vintners Association (LVA) before a ‘Supporting Irish Hospitality’ industry briefing in Buswells Hotel, Dublin.

The hospitality industry leaders said that their members’ businesses were now at a crossroads, ‘struggling to deal with very tight margins and reduced profitability due to ever-increasing operating costs’.

“To a large extent, this is being driven by the Government’s own economic policies including a series of employment-related cost increases coming into effect in close succession,” said the statement.

“The impact of these measures has been particularly acute for hospitality businesses given the labour-intensive nature of our industry.

“Businesses throughout the sector are forecasting worrying cost increases over the next twelve months at levels significantly outpacing inflation within the broader economy. This is on the back of a period of unprecedented cost increases in recent years,” they added.

They also pointed out that these businesses were also struggling to deal with the impact of significant pressures on consumer finances – all of which continue to reduce profitability and erode competitiveness.

“This poses an enormous concern given the implications for the long-term recovery of tourism and hospitality, our largest indigenous employer supporting some 270,000 livelihoods,” said the statement.

“While we have been repeatedly assured by the Government that it understands the extent of the challenges facing hospitality businesses, regrettably this has yet to translate into meaningful supports.

“It is now vital that the Government does everything possible to help put our sector and wider tourism industry on a more stable footing. At a minimum, this must include the reinstatement of the nine per cent VAT rate for food-related hospitality services,” they concluded.

Pictured: Minister of State for Disabilities and Galway East TD Anne Rabbitte with VFI member Cathal Sheridan from Milltown, and Portumna-native Adrian Cummins, CEO of the Restaurants Association of Ireland at the ‘Supporting Irish Hospitality’ event at Buswells Hotel is a hospitality coalition advocating to lower the VAT rate on food services from 13.5% to 9%.

Inside Track with John McIntyre

THE problem with knocking champions Dublin out of the hunt for All-Ireland glory is that expectations suddenly go through the roof for their conquerors. What had been a slow-burning campaign for the Galway footballers has finally taken off, but now Padraic Joyce’s team must back up that great performance.

There is no point in ending the All-Ireland hopes of Gaelic football’s dominant force over the past decade for some other county’s benefit. Galway did it the hard way too, having fallen five points behind in the first-half. Dublin were controlling the tempo of the quarter-final and the Connacht champions were struggling to hang on.

Galway had to raise their game and they weren’t found wanting. Cillian McDaid took the bull by the horns; Dylan McHugh and Johnny McGrath continued their terrific summer form; Seán Mulkerrin typified their defiance; while Shane Walsh – almost down to one leg – finished an absorbing contest with seven points to his credit.

You also had the likes of John Maher running himself into the ground; Tomo Culhane exorcising his late miss against Armagh with what proved the match-winner; together with a major impact from the substitutes bench as Cein D’Arcy and Johnny Heaney left their mark on the scoreboard too. And we can’t forget Galway’s long-serving midfield general Paul Conroy. He missed a couple of chances, but kept pulling the trigger.

It was a great day for Galway football and showed what the team is capable of, but nobody in the camp needs to be told that every game is different. The challenge for both management and players is to get back in the zone for Sunday’s semi-final battle with high-flying Donegal. The bookies nearly have it a 50/50 game and that’s how we see it too.

The word on the ground suggests Galway’s injury woes, which have dogged them all season, are almost cleared up, though there remain concerns about the form of team captain, Seán Kelly. McDaid, Walsh, and Damien Comer started a game for the first time together this year against Dublin and that experience can only have sharpened them up.

Pictured: Galway’s long-serving Paul Conroy on the ball against Frankie McGlynn of Donegal during a National League tie in February of 2014 at Pearse Stadium. The counties’ clash in Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final at Croke Park.

Galway hurling legend Iggy Clarke believes mental fitness is just as important as a player’s physical fitness, and strength and conditioning.

“If we’re mentally well and strong and healthy in ourselves, then we are going to play better,” he said.

Wing back on the senior All-Ireland winning team of 1980, the hurling icon feels modern players are under more pressure now than ever.

“The more we can do the better to relieve that pressure,” he said.

Movember Ahead of the Game is a programme that aims to tackle that stress – by building mental fitness and strengthening resilience of teenagers to deal with challenges in sport and life.

Iggy and Galway camogie star Niamh Hanniffy are two of over 20 facilitators on the programme who deliver workshops to young people about the power of talking and sharing.

Former Galway hurler Justin Campbell, counsellor and psychotherapist, is a supervisor who provides mentoring and support to the facilitators.

The emotional literacy programme is delivered by men’s health organisation Movember, the GAA and GPA (Gaelic Players Association).

Since it started last November, more than 5,000 people have been reached. That includes 3,000 teenage boys and girls in 176 clubs across 32 counties, including 12 clubs in Galway, as well as 2,000 of their parents and coaches.

“Most people know what physical injury is. But when it comes to a mental setback or a mental injury, the answers are not as fluent,” said Iggy, a counsellor and psychotherapist.

“The challenges we focus on in the programme are anxiety and depression – they’re the most prevalent. But there are other pressures, and social media is a huge pressure on young people,” he added.

Caption: Iggy Clarke….mental health as important as physical fitness.

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.