(More from the DV archive never before seen online. Here comes 2000!)
Sixty thousand people lined the streets to see the Macnas parade 'Listening Wind', involving more than five hundred
performers.
February 2000.
‘Non-National’ - Is that the Irish for ‘Nigger’?
If you can control your hate for just one moment, you’ll discover that not everyone eats bacon and laughs at D’Unbelievables, but everyone eats and laughs.
A shiver runs through me every time I hear the adjective ‘Non-National.’ My mind sees a sign pinned to Irish doors of the future:
No Dogs.
No Travellers.
No Non-Nationals.
Until you Irish stop constantly using the term ‘Non-National’ in a derogatory fashion, I will not tolerate any more hard-luck stories about us ‘evil’ Brits. I don’t want to hear about the famine, or any tales of prison ships waiting in the bay.
April 2000.
Patriotic Pricing?
Full marks to the video outfit that was offering the Dublin gangster movie The General at £14.99, with the biopic Michael Collins ‘thrown in’ for an extra £3.99.
It’s good to know how the Irish prioritise their historical heroes.
March 2000.
Galway’s not glad that you’re gay.
Let’s get something straight here: Galway is not a good place to be gay.
Ireland is not a good place to be gay.
I know several gay men living and working in Galway today, yet I’m sworn to secrecy by all of them.
In a recent article about ‘gaybashing’ in Sligo, the couple who run Galway’s nascent Gay and Lesbian Centre declined to give their real names, for fear of reprisals.
Our society simply does not accept lesbian and gay people. To come out in Ireland today is not just a decision to be open and honest about your sexuality. It’s a painful and massive choice that will completely define you.
You will be seen as some kind of zealot, making a stand. It will be difficult for you to live your life the way you choose, but at least you’ll live as yourself.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life writing false names for my friends. I will never get used to hiding people who are guilty of nothing but their own sexuality.
July 2000
In love with Galway City again!
Right now I’m head over kerblonkers in love with Galway City.
I love all the water in Galway: there’s water everywhere.
The bay and the river Corrib are only part of the story. A few yards off city centre streets I stand and watch trout jumping by the stillness of the myriad canals.
Shortcuts slip me away from racing shoppers to meandering currents, and past the University my feet ease alongside the river in rich wild pasture.
I love the Prom and the walk to Black Rock. I love to watch the Galwegians for whom this walk is a sacred ritual. Everyone, humble or proud, all of us, we walk up there, kick the wall, spin around and walk back to town.
I love the bats that swoop over Wolfe Tone bridge in the dusk of July nights.
The bats?
Sure, let’s not forget the bats.
Of course, I love Galway’s pubs. A quiet get-away-from-it-all pint in Garavan's is as close as you’ll ever get to a city centre country pub.
A gentle afternoon coffee in a plastic chair outside Neactain’s, where I can mingle, catch some rays and breath in time with the rhythm of the Kangos and JCBs.
I love the front bar of the Quays, where Biddy Ward’s ghost sits and sups her Satzenbrau in the corner, scowling at how the rest of the place has become a Paddywood theme pub. Somehow the tiny old front bar retains its integrity, despite the efforts of its owners.
I love Harriet Leander’s Nimmo’s, the ‘Great Escape’ - the weird, the wood, and the wonderfully eccentric.
Onwards to the Blue Note, where Cian and Whispering Blue are flying behind the bar, legends in their own long-limbed lunchtimes.
Watch those lads serve alcohol to da eager yoof-full punters or, even better, watch them drink out of hours - it’s like standing by Niagara Falls. You never thought so much liquid could go down so quickly and still look natural.
Love it? I do, I will and I have, on many occasions.
I love breakfast at Spud Murphy’s, where the tea comes strong, the service smooth and unobtrusive. I love a ciabatta roll from McCambridge’s, where fresh warm wafty bread is filled with deli-counter goodies for around two quid.
I love lunch in River God Café, looking down to the Quay Street hordes while snarfing excellent gastronomic gobfuls, in gentle wooden surroundings, for under a fiver.
I love a late one downstairs at the Crane. Upstairs I get depressed watching the earnest faces of Euro Hosteleroes, as they discuss and ‘deconstruct’ traditional music.
I feel music is meant to be enjoyed. Downstairs, offering a neat and tender dividing line between what was and what is Galway, the local community survives and thrives.
July 2000.
Makes me feeeel gooood....
The Brazilian national soccer coach is called Wanderley Luxemburgo.
Just saying it makes me feel good.
Wanderley Luxemburgo......
Wanderley Luxemburgo........
Ahhh.......
July 2000.
The sun shone and Galway smiled.
It was impossible not to be infected with the happiness all around. Standing on a balcony at Jury’s Meridian I had a marvellous view of the parade as it emerged from Merchant’s Road, and the Londoner in me was impressed by the whole occasion.
Those Macnites hide away in Fisheries Field and work all year as acid-drunken elves on this explosion of vitality and colour, and then it emerges along our streets as the words of a secret finally being revealed.
Oh, so that’s what they’ve been up to! Wow, and fair play to ‘em! Here comes the excellent and much-loved local hero, Little John Nee, working the crowd, getting us all giggling and excited.
John is a performer with star quality and integrity, but who’s the guy in the marathon outfit, and the fat fella with the suitcases? What’s the story with the bride with the beard, and who cares?
The floats drift by, wonderful gigantic cycloptic Phil Lynotts and inexplicable wobbly inflated heads. Drums kerthrummping, brass bands pachowing, and children dressed in shimmering blue silk, dancing on stilts.
What was that one?
Dunno, but it’s pretty innit?
Yeeeeah!
More towering vacillating forty-foot people stamping immigration papers that spray water, and why?
What was the theme again?
Hey Macnas, if you’re trying to be political, share it with the group!
It looks utterly beautiful, even if I’m almost completely in the dark about who was what, and why, but that dancing caterpillar wiggles its arse as well as any Chinese Dragon I ever saw in San Francisco.
Just as that thought passes my mind, the local lass behind me shouts excitedly:
“Sure, who needs Rio de Janeiro when you have Galway City!?!”
Visions of months of rain and damp spores on my Claddagh bedroom walls rush through my mind, but they are hit head-on with the euphoria of this day.
Hell yeh, Galway is great at times like this, a town that hosts a three week party every year and invites sixteen times its own population to join in - we really do know how to have fun!
Most of the Arts Festival passes us everyday local types by. We don’t suddenly have fifty quid spare to take the kids and check out a show.
Sometimes it seems like the downside - the crowds, litter, madness and all the shite that succours the grouch - is all there is, but then Macnas come along, and give something back to the people who happen to live here.
Whether this year’s parade was better or worse than other years’ is not the point.
The sun shone and Galway smiled.
I felt proud to live here; to be a part of it.
August 2000.
Galway - a place with tourists, or just a tourist place?
It is with much relief that I welcome the end of summer - a good season weatherwise, and one in which I saw Galway city as something new.
No longer a real place visited by tourists, Galway is now a tourist place.
The regeneration of Quay Street, along with the Film Fleadh, Arts Festival, Race Week, and Salthill’s seaside season, has created an entirely new place.
We now live to serve the tourist. They dominate us in the Summer, and rather than the visitors getting a chance to see how we live, here in the West of Ireland, we live simply for them.
We now instinctively duck to avoid their pointing lenses, so as not to mess up their shot.
We are, of course, lucky to live in such a beautiful place, which attracts so many others.
Yet inasmuch as I will miss the swallows and the sunshine, I will not mourn the loss of feeling like a secondary citizen in my home town.
Bring on those autumn gales.
January 2000.
A Part Of It And Apart From It On Nimmo’s Pier!
I’ll always remember exactly where I was when we slipped into the 21st Century.
A few days before the big night I realised that as I was not going to be in the arms of my recently estranged wife, I didn’t want to be with anyone else.
A strange soul at the best of times, I’m often happiest in a state of reflective detachment.
The afternoon was passed in Neactain's, where friends from Ireland, Australia and America supped the black, and took surreptitious shots of absinthe which was being passed around in a bottle of Paddy’s.
Mixed with the Jamie’s a treat it did, hoh yes.
Life offers cruel and wonderful ironies. The only appropriate outfit for my personal night out seemed to be the linen suit in which I got married.
By 11:45, I was standing on top of the wall at the end of the Nimmo’s Pier in one swishy suit, Kenneth Cole shoes and a Jerry Garcia tie, listening to the shouts and sirens of the evening; only the hardest of misanthropes would fail to feel a thrill.
Directly overhead were Orion and Taurus, The Hunter and the Bull, still in conflict, just as they were a thousand years ago.
The swans were desperately trying to ignore us crazy humans. To them, and to the ink black sea sloshing on the beach behind me, it was just another night.
To us it was something special.
I took stock of the year just gone. I’d lost a marriage and gained a home. Matters that managed to pull a knot in my gut and water from my eyes.
Then the bells started chiming and the cheers rang out from Eyre Square; foghorns blasted cacophony from the ships in the docks.
All around Galway Bay there exploded an outpouring of noise, light and jubilation. Green showers of light from Oranmore, red fires in Kinvara, while scattered parties around the Swamp let off fireworks; families doing their own thing; children squealing.
I felt deliciously a part of it and apart from it.
A small crowd of people who’d emerged from a camper van at the other end of the pier were making their way towards me. With their backs to the van’s headlights they looked like the aliens in Close Encounters, but they were so very human.
“Happy New Year!” she said, appearing next to me on the wall, her eyes glowing with spirit, her skin beautiful in the light of the new millennium night.
“Isn’t it great to be alive!” she said.
I looked around me, knowing that good friends were awaiting my arrival, scanning the crazy beauty of the river Corrib, listening to the cheers of the people of the city of Galway, loving the power of the water behind me and the splendour of the sky above.
Not least, so aware that a total stranger was chatting to me as if she had known me from the womb.
The words stuck a little in my throat, but they did come out and they felt good.
“Yes. Yes it is. It’s good to be alive!”
©Charlie Adley
16.04.2026.
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