LET’S ALL GET ON BOARD WITH THE CLADDAGH BOATMEN!

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(Admirably, Bádóirí an Cladaig teo - the Claddagh Boatmen - insisted they wanted me to write a purely positive progress report: please find below. However, in my opinion, this splendid community group have constantly been hampered and harassed by bureaucratic incompetence and small-minded officials, lacking courage and vision.)

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As 2020 Capital of Culture approaches, there’s much discussion about what is and is not Galway culture. About Galway’s boats there can be no debate. Take a look at artist Eamon O’Doherty’s Quincentennial Sails sculpture in Eyre Square: the essence of Galway culture, those sails express the vital relationship between Galway and its unique boats.
 
Nothing more wholly represents Galway culture. History and poetry combine in those black hulls and russet sails; in that blend of bay, boat and Burren.
 
Despite recently facing extinction, hookers are now being restored and sailed once more.
 
Thanks to community group Bádóirí an Cladaig teo - the Claddagh Boatmen - a new generation are being taught how to build hookers; how to sail them; how to navigate and maintain them.
 
With centuries of expertise in their genes, this group of Claddagh men decided to revive Galway’s maritime tradition, and on the way gained the support of our entire community.
 
After restoring their first boat in 2009, the Boatmen nurtured a vision of hookers moored from Spanish Arch to Jury’s hotel. On Culture Night this year, six restored hookers were moored along that wall.
 
They had made their dream a reality.
 
As group secretary Peter Connolly explained, that vision has now grown.
 
“The Regatta has been a phenomenal success over the last 4 years, and May 2017 will see the launch of our new initiative, in support of 2020. The Navigational Trust has allowed the use of the Claddagh Basin, so the sailing communities of Claddagh, Connemara and Kinvara will come together to showcase 14 boats in full sail, for an entire week, subject to weather conditions.
 
“Each boat will carry an emblem of a Tribe of Galway, and they’ll sail together over the next four summers, in the build-up to 2020. 

"We’ve also invited two 40 foot Viking boats from Bangor, while the 47ft Chicago-built hooker ‘Naoimh Bairbre’ sailed across the Atlantic, to be left in the caretakership of Bádóirí an Cladaig teo for 10 years, for training and tours on the bay, with all income to be reinvested into our project.
 
“All these crews, owners and countless others support this project, yet nobody has asked for any money. Not one person. Why is that? They love the Galway hooker. It’s in their blood.

 

 
“Only a massive combined community effort could achieve so much so quickly. We’re grateful for the support of small businesses, the general public, the Latin Quarter, West End Group and Galway City Partnership, and we’ve had tremendous support in the council chamber. Now that the city hierarchy is fully behind the project, the work feels so much easier.
 
“Nothing would be possible without the partnerships we’ve developed. The DSP seconded 35 trainees for work experience and the GRETB supplied a support builder and six others. Everyone has enabled our project to succeed.
 
“We needed young people on board, to build skills through training and education, and that has happened. We needed a team to maintain the boats. That has been done.
 
“Next came the training of confident crews and skippers, and thanks to the expertise of people from Connemara, we’ve now 10 skippers trained up and several very competent crews.
 
“Finance has been a problem since recent scandals concerning charities. There was a government drive to support Community Groups, but sadly they’re so concerned with correct corporate governance, it makes a mockery of the grant process.
 
“Groups like ours have to spend 25% of our grant on public liability insurance and another 25% on accountancy and audits. We are left financially strangled. There has to be a way of doing this which allows us to apply all the grant money to the purposes for which it was granted.
 
“Our fundraising has matched all grants for the last five years, yet we can’t afford to develop the website. We wouldn’t dare do that before we bought a nail. Buying nails comes first. A certified nail from Glasgow is much more important than spending money on a website.
 
“We completely respect everybody’s contribution, and believe we’ve spent every cent efficiently. We work 6 days a week, but when you see the smiles of people from all over the world, and particularly the young people of Galway, it’s wonderful. The usual comment is that they feel privileged to have sailed on Galway bay on a Galway Hooker.
 
“This is no longer the vision of Bádóirí an Cladaig teo. This is now Galway’s vision. When a fleet of hookers are in full sail, with hundreds of people taking photos on Claddagh Quay, we might ask:
 
“Is our dream is too big? No. Does Galway deserve this? I think we do. Is this part of Claddagh? Yes it is. Is this real Galway? Yes it is.”
 
Well said sir. What better way to launch Capital of Culture 2020 than a fleet of 14 Galway hookers, the greatest symbols of Galway’s culture, sailing up the Corrib, bearing the crests of all the Tribes?
 
If that sounds perfect, please give everyone you know a beautiful Bádóirí an Cladaig calendar this Christmas. Then, when you first sail on a hooker in Galway bay, you can feel proud that you too had the vision to support the Claddagh Boatmen’s magnificent dream.
 
Calendars available at: Woods, Roundstone. Joyces, Recess. Morans, Carna. OMaille, Rosmuc. Hooker Bar, Eannach Mheain. Zetland, Cashel. Slemons Daybreak, Furbo. Post office, Kinvara. Clarks Supervalue, Barna. Charlie Byrnes Bookshop, Middle Street. Londis, Newcastle Rd. Nestors Supervalue Fr Griffin Rd.

 

© Charlie Adley
04.12.2016.

Trump is a problem but he’s not the problem!

Thanks as always to Allan Cavanagh caricatures-ireland.com

Trump is a problem but he’s not the problem.

 

A vacuous psychopath, Trump had to win the game, but he’s just another contestant in an evolving show. To focus on Trump is to miss the point entirelly.

 

Politics is not about Left or Right any more. This is a revolution from all sides of what used to be the political spectrum, from Trump to Podemos; Corbyn to Le Pen; alt-Right to Syriza; Bernie Sanders to Alternative für Deutschland.

The only thing that these disparate types have in common is that they all want to erase what was.

 

Trump’s victory was another manifestation of the frustration of people who live in a system that no longer works for them. Successive electorates have spurned traditional voting patterns, because they see that Western Democracy has been dying for decades.

 

The Irish know first hand, having voted against two EU treaties only to have their rejections ignored. Hillary won a million more votes than Trump and lost, so half of America feels unheard. Half of the UK population want to stay in the EU, the young and urban at odds with the older and rural.

 

Wherever you look there are too many people feeling ignored.

 

Time was when governments governed and leaders lead. However, over the last 30 years there have been extraordinary changes in the way the world works. They combine to negate the effectiveness of our old political system.

Once governments were active, imposing ideologies upon their people. For some time now they have been able only to react to global economic conditions; the fluctuations of currencies; the mood of the markets.

Through systemic tax avoidance, trade deals like TTIP and trading blocks like the EU, corporations are now powerful enough to dictate to governments; to intervene in the running of previously sovereign nations.

Now businesses are able to sue governments for loss of profits they might have earned in the future; workers’ rights, guaranteed hours and job security have eroded into dust; overseas entities are able to operate inside other nations’ health and eduction sectors and universally, voters are outraged that their politicians serially fail them.

As is their wont in matters of democracy, the Greeks led the way by electing Syriza, followed by the UK with Brexit.

Then America, as ever contributing on the grandest of scales, illustrated that politics as we knew it is dead, by choosing a businessman to lead them into this new corporate order.

Admittedly, politicians were never a perfect bunch, but as the entire political and financial world continues to metamorphose, our decrepit democratic systems have become sadly unable to satisfy us ever again.

Whoever might lead your country, no government will be able to improve the lot of its people unless their needs happen to mirror the needs of the abstract notion of global economy.

Why else would we suffer the obscenity of an Irish government appealing against a ruling requiring a corporation to pay taxes equivalent to this country’s annual health budget?

Stop crying foul and start asking the right questions.

Here’s one: if Donald Trump had walked up to you five years ago and told you that he’d be president of the USA one day, would you have believed him? Did you believe that he was really going to build a wall equivalent to the distance from Rome to Moscow? Did you really believe he really believed anything he said during that vile campaign?

Yet still yourselves and the media ask the old questions, as if he meant what he said. 

Everyone focuses on Trump, rather than those who voted for him, yet if he'd needed to be further to the left than Bernie Sanders to win the election, he would’ve made Lenin look like Dubya.

Vacant and vain, obsessed only with winning, Trump is the natural leader of the way the world now works. Avoiding the dangers of having to face journalists in traditional media, he addresses the nation via You Tube and Twitter.

Telling analysis came from Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s book, ‘The Art Of The Deal.’ Having worked one to one with Trump for years, he described the President-Elect as having the "intelligence and attention span of a 9-year old with ADHD.”

 

An empty vessel, utterly out of his depth, Trump doesn’t worry me. The people around him, who do know what they’re doing, scare the hell out of me.

In Mike Pence we have a Creationist a mere choked pretzel away from the presidency. The US National Security Advisor is the person who collates information from all the military and security agencies and combines it to advise the president on what to do. 

Shame then that it's Micael Flynn, who was sacked by Obama for incometpency, after leaking confidential information and coming out with what became known as 'Flynn Facts', such as that fear of Muslims is rational. He also tweeted 'Not any more, Jews!' which is more than a little disturbing. 

Chief strategist Bannon is on board to keep the hate alive, as Trump concedes each of his more aggressive and ridiculous election pledges, one by one.

While he needs to be seen working with Tea Party types, Trump realises that to win this new reality show, his pragmatism has to kick in fast and bigly.

Tragically, Trump’s presidency will see a rabid and regressive hijacking of the Supreme Court, with women's rights, workers’ rights, gun control and even the separation of church and state all suddenly vulnerable.

Western democracy now leaves millions of voters on all sides of the political arena frustrated and furious.

We must stop trying to find a solution within the old system and accept that we have created a society driven not by the needs of the many, but the needs of conglomerates.

Then we might start the process of devising a representative political system for that world; our new world.

©Charlie Adley

27.11.2016.

HYPERBOLIC BISCUITS AND HYSTERICAL HISTORICALS!

The other night I was spacing out in front of the fire, staring at a box of Marks and Sparks ‘Extremely Chocolatey Milk Chocolate All Butter Biscuits’ on the coffee table.
 

Wonderful, I mused. They’ve called their biscuits exactly what their customers want to see.
 

Imagine a brave new world where the nanny state runs amok and truth rules. How much would you want to reach for ‘Fat Free But Stuffed With Tons Of Sugar So You’ll Still Be A Fat Basstid Frozen Yoghurt’, or, as The Snapper suggested, ‘Incredibly Addictive Diet Cola Crammed With Known Carcinogens.’
 

Irish elections would be contested between the ‘There’s Bugger All Difference Between Us And Them Party’, the ‘We’ll Screw You In A Different Way To Them Party’ and the ‘We Collectively Sound Like Miracle Workers But We Don’t Have The Money To Make It Work Alliance.’
 

Within the self-serving confines of the Irish legal system, Tribunals would become ‘Lawyer Feeding Frenzy With No Chance Of A Meaningful Verdict Fiasco.’
 

We’d have the ‘We’ve Got A Richer Foreign Criminal Than You So We’ll Win It Premier League’, while Irish and Australian teams would play the ‘We’re Just Going To Beat The Crap Out Of Each Other International Rules Test Match.’
 

Evidently M&S think their customers incapable of grasping the fairly simple idea that there’s a whole heap of chocolate on these biscuits, because below their extremely explicative name on the box, yet another line of copy claims:

MORE CHOCOLATE THAN BISCUIT.
 

Whoosh … my brain's lost, pondering the deep philosophical matter of whether a chocolate biscuit can actually still be a biscuit, if it is 

MORE CHOCOLATE THAN BISCUIT.
 

Truth be told, I don’t know what’s worse: the way my tiny mind works, or that I share it in public.

***

So rarely in life do you get to say the funny thing at the right time. When somebody upsets you or when you feel you have a point to make, the words just don’t come. You dip your chin in the face of your enemy, because in the heat of battle your brain dries up.
 

You know that you’re capable of a killer line, but it comes to you days later, with a stab of sorrow at four in the morning: it’s too late. 

If only you could've said that back then, everyone would think you such a witty whizz.
 

Yet others rarely judge our ability to slice the air with sharp strokes of verbal swords. I like to think that as a species we are slightly more substantial than that.
 

But boy oh boy, when the right words come, I don’t care how shallow I’m being. Last week I was walking down Shop Street, looking across Johnny Massacre Corner to a large crowd of tourists standing opposite the Kings Head pub.
 

Their tour guide was shrilly explaining how  "... nobody knows the identity of the executioner of England’s King Charles I, but -”
 

at which point he was interrupted by an energetic local lad, coming up the street, who turned to the crowd, stretched a smile on his lips, raised his arm in the air and cried with exuberant triumphant pride:
 

“He was an Irishman!”
 

at which the crowd laughed heartily.
 

Despite a healthy sense of humour, my head was racing with the crassness of this guy’s misplaced pride. Frantically searching my brainbox for something to say, I was about to come face to face with himself the Historical Proclaimer.
 

It had to be quick. Neither he nor I had slowed our brisk walking pace. In seconds we’d be past each other and the crowd, walking in opposite directions.
 

This was not the moment to suggest that Gunning, their ‘Irishman', probably wasn’t the man who executed King Charles I, because another bloke called William Hewlett was later convicted of regicide, after Charles II returned to the throne.
 

Anyway, it wasn’t yer man’s historical inaccuracy that irked me.

No, the hottest potato baking inside my brainbox was wondering how the killing of that English king did the Irish any good.
 

And then it came to me. Just simply exactly what I wanted to say. In retrospect, I’ll admit it looks rather feeble, not much of a witty gem at all, but at the time it just seemed perfect.
 

As the two of us walked past each other, I turned to the crowd and shouted:
 

“Yep, he did exactly what Cromwell wanted!”
 

Then I walked on, leaving himself to ponder that little baby, and the tourists to wonder if they had just experienced some kind of wonderful Irish street theatre.
 

Did any of them give a damn about who was right or wrong?
 

No.
 

Did any of them care that a mere 3 years after the king’s execution, Cromwell declared himself Lord Protector, which did the Irish very few favours?
 

Not a single one.
 

Had I in any way inhibited yer man from feeling good each and every time the Irish walloped the English?
 

About as likely as him wearing a Glasgow Rangers shirt.
 

Nevertheless, as I walked down the road I felt a spring in my step and a thrill in my heart. Even though I’d impressed nobody but myself, I was delighted.
 

For once, I’d said the right words at the right time, and in my sad little existence, I savour these tiny harmless victories like ripe berries on the bush.

©Charlie Adley
13.11.2016

WHEN ‘SOLAR BONES’ WON, I DID TOO, IN A STRANGE WAY!

When Galway-based writer Mike McCormack's novel Solar Bones won both the Goldsmiths Prize and Novel of the Year at the 2016 Bord Gáis Book Awards, I was just a little bit too excited. 

His triumph brought with it a minor victory for me, on both a personal and professional level, as throughout my life I’ve had a difficult relationship with literature. 

Thrust ahead a year at school by educators who didn't understand the difference between intelligence and academic ability, I found myself surrounded by incredibly clever students. 

English Public Schools exist to produce candidates most likely to succeed at Oxford and Cambridge. While many from that class proceeded to do just that, for me university was never an option.
 
Every teenager needs to go through a phase when nobody appears to understand them, and this was mine. Everyone in my life kept telling me how clever I was; that my failures were the result of sloth and indifference; that if only I worked a bit harder, I might just surprise myself.
 
School reports through the years inevitably said the same thing: ‘Could do better.’

Nobody listened when I tried to explain that I had genuine trouble assimilating information from text books. Then a powerful cocktail of hormones and Punk Rock met this onslaught of expectation, and I reacted in a predictably adolescent way.
 
It went something like this:
 
‘You insist that I read your books? Well I won’t read them. I won’t even go to university, because I'm fed up to the back teeth with being told to learn. Yes, of course I want to learn, and will continue to do so joyously throughout my life, but there’s more to learning than books by old fogeys and fathomless farts whose language I cannot take in. I will work in a warehouse, ride a motorbike and reject your academic world, where I feel inadequate and stupid. I will hitchhike thousands of miles and learn from that as much as your high literature will ever teach me.’
 
So I did, and along the way devoured books that I read of my own volition. Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound For Glory served to rip apart the cosy confines of my bourgeois mind, showing me a braver way. Inspiring and wonderful, I still read it every couple of years.
 
In my early 20s I found two of my favourite writers. Richard Brautigan wrote with more of a brush than a pen, creating gentle lyrical ethereal prose that kisses poetry. His writing marries romance, wit and magical realism, elevating me to a better place and leaving a wry smile on my face every time.
 
Charles Bukowski could not appear at first more different, with his low-life misogynistic alcoholic profane guttural. Disgusting and shocking, his own anti-hero, I find him irresistible, as I do Brautigan, because both men are phenomenally honest.
 
On every course that I teach, a student will ask:
 
“Can I do this, Charlie? Can I use three narrative voices? Can I tell the story backwards?”
 
“Yes, you can do anything you want. Absolutely anything at all, as long as it works.”
 
The advice is a tad oversimplistic, because what works for one might not for another. When I read John Banville’s Booker Prize winning novel The Sea, I was transported back to those dark classroom days. 

The fact that I didn’t like the melancholy drudge of the tone of the book was my own problem: a matter of subjective taste, but I hated feeling excluded and ignorant because I wasn’t familiar with the paintings and artists alluded to so often throughout the book.
 
That didn’t work for me, because I felt as if he was only writing for a few people; those who might fully appreciate how much he knows.
 
Absolutely not my kind of book.
 
Through the guidance of my friend and teacher Iris Leal, I have overcome my dread of anything considered high literature. 30 years ago she insisted that I read Anna Karenina, and I was astonished to find Tolstoy's language so simple and accessible. She led me to Boyhood and Youth, by JM Coetzee, where I adored his uniquely simple voice, and amazed myself to find I loved the work of a Nobel Laureate.
 
Moving to Galway, I was entranced by Walter Macken’s grit, honesty and grá for the West of Ireland, and recently I've been swept away in a wonderful wave of new Irish writing. 

Lisa McInerney’s Glorious Heresies was a tremendous piece of storytelling, as shocking and exciting as Paul Abbot’s Shameless, when it first appeared on TV. 

Donal Ryan’s Spinning Heart was a huge hit, but it’s his short stories that occasionally make me catch my breath. Eimear McBride's Lesser Bohemians and Kevin Barry's City of Bohane lead the charge with their stylised language and alternative takes on reality.

My friend Claire-Louise Bennett’s astonishing debut Pond has taken the literary establishment by storm. A reviewer claimed she had reinvented the non-novel, and no, I don’t know what that means either, but away from all the literary la-di-da, her book is a great read.
 
My little victory?
 
As I joined in the single sentence that is Solar Bones I felt no fear. Immediately aware that this book was Mayo man Mike McCormack's masterpiece, I felt deeply thankful that it never once impressed upon me the weight of its own cleverness.
 
A slice of West of Ireland Zeitgeist; a philosophical pondering on life and death; a fascinating insight into the mind of an engineer; a perfectly drawn microcosm of the political attitudes of this nation, past and present and a comforting illustration of a loving family’s life, Solar Bones is a triumph.
 
More than that, for me it felt great to love a book that others then classified as high literature.
 
There’s hope for me yet.

© Charlie Adley
13.11.16.

I think we're all ready for Punk Football!

Thanks as always to caricatures-ireland.com

There were so many different reasons for a nine year-old boy to feel excited that day. 

I was going to see Chelsea play for the first time in my life. 
I was going to see Chelsea with my Dad. 
I was being taken to the football by the person who gave me the love of football in the first place.
 
Every child that was first taken to see their team play by a parent will know what that experience means. In the years to come, before any concept of bonding existed, my father and I did just that over our love of the Chelsea. 

We couldn’t unite over our love of watching the Chelsea play, because in those days our team only turned in a performance when their chakras were aligned with seven pints of Watney’s Red Barrel and a Ruby Murray.
 
Plenty to feel excited about on a unique day in that nine year-old’s life, yet only one shock gasp of pure pleasure and a moment of abject embarrassment have stayed lodged in my head since 1969.
 
My unexpected thrill came before the game, as my short legs climbed the last of a mountain of steps, and we emerged at the top of the West Stand. 

I hadn’t given the ground a moment’s thought, so it was wonderful to find myself involuntarily stopping in my tracks, looking out over the great expanse of deep green grass, sharply divided by perfectly pristine white lines, so unlike anything I’d ever seen in the muddy mires of the park or at school.
 
As my chin dropped in thrall, my eyes wandered around Stamford Bridge, looking vast with its greyhound track between the pitch and the crowd. The sound of the songs from the Shed transfixed my senses.
 
I couldn’t take my eyes off those crammed masses on Chelsea’s hallowed terrace, where the scarves swayed above the fans’ heads in a sea of blue.
 
Instantly part of me wanted to be down there, in the midst of the throng, but more, I was just loving being there with my dad.
That’s why, when the game finished 1-1, it was beyond painful to ask him when the replay would be.
 
“There’s no replay. It’s a league game.” he explained calmly, as inside my pre-teen head my voice roared I knew that! Why did I ask such a stupid question? Now he’ll think I don't know anything about football! Why did I ask that?
 
In the 70s and 80s football was very far from perfect. Fascists sold National Front newspapers outside the grounds, and when as a 17 year-old I went to stand in the Shed, I spent more time trying to stay away from fights than I did watching football. 

Mind you, to that teenager little compared to the tribal ecstasy of a mass of manhood, moving as one in outrageous jubilation, when we scored a goal.
 
More important than anything football might offer, my father and I went to football together for years. Having forced me to go to a school that insisted on Saturday attendance, Dad then colluded with me in schemes of skullduggery that required me to skive off on a Saturday afternoon.
 
At the sound of the bell after the last morning class, I’d shoot down the mile-long drive at full speed, hoping to break free before the Monitors arrived to guard the gates.
 
Then I’d jump on the train and head to Finchley Road tube, where my Dad was waiting in the car, engine running, parked on a double yellow, eager to head off to the ground.
 
It still feels wonderful to have shared those times of 40 years ago together. They were only possible because the game back then was completely accessible.
 
If you saved all the cut-out-and-keep coupons on the back page of the Chelsea matchday programme, you could send off for an FA Cup Final ticket. My Dad and I did just that, and went to two Wembley cup finals together.
 
If he were still alive today my father would no longer recognise the league we watched together. We had season tickets because regular people like us could afford them, and we’d turn up at away grounds, pay a couple of quid at the turnstiles and get tickets for game.
 
To have access to today’s Premiership you need to buy a club membership and then sell your youngest child into slavery, so that you can afford to take your other child to a game.
 
As letter writer Dave Robbie recently pointed out in the Irish Times, when the Lilywhites of Dundalk secured their third consecutive League of Ireland title, the club won the equivalent of 33% of Wayne Rooney’s weekly salary.
 
We know that footballers are today’s rock stars, their clubs the bands of the 21st century, and there’s no doubt the game has become too distant from its fans.
 
Before Punk, all we’d known were the supergroups. Disgustingly rich rock stars, performing half a mile away from fans who felt little affinity with them. 

Just as it was with those ‘progressive’ rock’ stars of old, it’s increasingly difficult to see our modern vain pampered footballers as heroes.
 
My relationship with Chelsea FC has changed fundamentally. My club is now a corporation, performing with all the common sense, compassion and integrity expected of a business entity.
 
Despite that, I still love the game, but I wonder: just as Punk replaced those inflated ego supergroups of the 1970s with street-level energy and enthusiasm, has the time finally come for Punk Football to hit the world?
 
Will a movement rise from people outraged by the greed inherent in the game?
 
Might we return football to its muddy grass roots? 
Can we rip it up and start again?
©Charlie Adley
29.10.2016.