Dancing to Music from Hell

Part of my youth died yesterday on hearing of the sad passing of Meatloaf. The man was a force of nature. During my student days at UCG(NUIG), his operatic voice, Wagnerian ballads, music pulsating with pent-up passion captivated so many of our hearts, souls and bodies transforming us at the discos into demonic creatures dancing madly to the strains of 'Paradise by the Dashboard' and then, as if by magic, becoming lovable sweet angels gently holding our partners swaying slowly to the tender sounds of 'Heaven Can Wait'.

Thank you Meatloaf- you were a gift from heaven during that halycon era of the late 1970s-early 1980, giving us so much love, fun and joy. Godspeed agus ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam

A final word of praise to Gerry Sexton, his disciple on Earth who served him so well in his role as Galway's finest college DJ, pumping out the good vibrations at the Beach, the Aula, the International....

UCG Student Days & Nights– The wonderful Stories that must be told!

 

Dancing in the Aula on a Friday night, UCG, 1979

A few weeks ago, I completed a month’s leave of absence from my employment at NUI Galway. I took this break for two reasons:

(a) to concentrate on promoting the ‘Galway National Park City’ initiative and particularly to lobby the councillors of Galway City Council to include this designation within the Galway City Development Plan 2023-2029 in order to make our city a flagship for sustainability and environmentalism that other cities would emulate. In spite of the support of many councillors (Niall Murphy, Imelda Byrne, Owen Hanley, Frank Fahy, Terry O’Flaherty, Deputy Mayor Martina O’Connor and Mayor Colette Connolly), that did not happen. A motion to have it deferred to a later date was passed. This is no bad thing as it will give time to prepare further to ensure that City Hall adopts an initiative that has been endorsed by President Michael D. Higgins (our patron), Duncan Stewart as our National Champion, Kathryn Tierney as our EU champion, and over 100 champions from across all sectors of local society. But more on that anon!

 

(b) to start the research for a book that I have postponed for far too long about student life in Galway during the period of 1975-1981. Over the years, I have gathered together a wonderful collection of photos and stories of that exciting era which I and so many of my good friends were part of.

Thanks to the introduction of state grants for third level education I was part of a first generation of young people from small farming and working backgrounds who got the opportunity to go to university and the technology colleges. We had no idea what to expect. But the change to us personally and to Irish society was monumental. We arrived to what was essentially a large but quiet town in the West of Ireland as starry-eyed young teenagers leaving home for the first time. It was my first time west of the river Shannon.

 

As the days, weeks, months and years rolled by, we immersed ourselves in the freedoms offered as the campus became an exciting spicy melting pot of radical priests, nuns, monks, capitalists, liberals, communists, socialists, republicans, artists, musicians, army officers, scientists, innovators and so much more. Every issue under the Sun (& beyond) was debated and argued at meetings, over coffee in the daytime and over pints on Thursday nights. By the time most of us had left UCG (later NUIG) and RTC (GMIT) a few years later, it had been transformed beyond recognition into a vibrant cosmopolitan city pulsating with social, political, economic, scientific, technological and artistic activity, made possible by the youthful creativity of its new population of students and those that came to work in its new factories, arts centres and expanded hospitals. We felt like pioneers opening up a new frontier where anything was possible and very little was out of bounds. 

 

In our time in Galway we were also part of the first wave of Irish youth that discovered the newly unfolding Global Village as we spent summers working as far afield as Atlantic City, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Amsterdam and Munich; or travelling by ferry, train, and camper van to Athens, Berlin, Belgrade, Kabul, Kathmandu and Marrakesh. When we didn’t travel abroad for the summers, we hitchhiked to the many open air musical festivals that started to appear across the country including Lisdoonvarna, Ballisodare, Slane to Carnsore Point. 

 

In UCG, we studied hard and attended lectures given by inspirational lecturers (Michael D Higgins, TP O'Neill, Pete Smith, Emer Colleran, Gearoid O'Tuathaigh, Iggy O'Muircheartaigh, Chris Stevens, Gerry Humphreys, Nicholas Canny, Mícheál Mac Craith, Breandan Mac Aodha, Ollie Ryan, Rosaleen O'Neill, Owen Bourke, Jim Gosling, Kevin Boyle, Tony Finan, Frank Imbusch, Leo Smyth, Bill Shade, Jim Flavin, Ma Heavey, Tom Boylan, Jimmy Browne, Hubert McDermott…); played sport or organised a plethora of cultural events; often protested, marched and occupied college or state buildings as we passionately fought against discrimination on all fronts both at home and abroad; on Thursday and Friday nights we socialised in the city centre, danced in the nightclubs of Salthill and partied (no drugs, no violence) late into the night in student houses across Galway. 

 

So it is long past the time that the seriousness, inventiveness, madness and humour of this previously unwritten part of modern Ireland was captured and made known to present and future generations.

I made friendships then that have lasted a lifetime. I owe it to these good folk to ensure our times together will not be forgotten.

Publication Date: 2022.

 

p.s. Photo was taken at a Friday night Disco in the Aula section of the Quad in UCG. This was a regular event organised by the Students' Union. No alcohol was served. Students just went along to dance the night away!

p.p.s. If anyone feels they may have photos/images or some interesting stories to tell related to the period 1975-'81, please do not hesitate to contact me

A fully operational Apple Macintosh joins the Museum!

A working Macintosh SE (System Expansion) from the late 1980s has been added to our new interactive Apple zone.

This personal computer is part of an initiative to make the museum even more 'hands-on' in readiness for the museum being opened every Saturday from next month onwards.
It will also form part of a major exhibition to be launched in April entitled "A Byte of the Apple”.

This particular SE comes with an array of business and games software including MacDraw, Excel and Star Wars.
It was secured from Adrian in Waterford.
The black wooden display unit on which the new Mac proudly sits was donated by Tom Callanan. The Mac Carry Bag was supplied by Pat Anderson.
So a big 'Bualadh Bos' (Irish =round of applause) to Adrian, Tom and Pat!!

Launched in March 1987 the SE was the first Macintosh to come with an internal drive bay for a hard disk or a second floppy drive and was the first compact Macintosh that featured an expansion slot

‘Back to the Future’- Online Social Media, Video Conferencing & Cloud Computing in 1980s Galway

-->

'Computer Society' stand on Student Societies Day UCG (NUIG), Sept 1980

Technology innovation, communications and learning is so much part of the fabric of modern Galway. Children and their parents are together attending Saturday morning classes to learn how to code; people of all ages are daily accessing online services for hotel bookings, banking details and information services; teenagers are flirting online with their boyfriends and girlfriends in different schools during class time; robotics are taught in our third level colleges; our pre-teen and early youngsters are becoming renowned digital makers who are demonstrating their own programmable automated devices at the Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS; a multi-national Mervue-based company employing over one hundred college graduates is developing a revolutionary new type of search engine; Galway’s high tech industry is creating thousands of jobs that is earning the city a worldwide  reputation for business and responsible for a large slice of Ireland’s export trade. Mobile phones and video conferencing communications are changing the way we socialise and do business.
 

Whilst these details could define Galway city in 2018, there are in fact stories of Galway as it was during the 1980s! 

Test of PDP-11 computers in Ballybrit Galway, 1975

Find out more about the city’s proud digital heritage at a fascinating talk by Brendan Smith, curator of the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland based at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at NUI Galway, that will take place at 2.30pm on Saturday February 24^th in the Galway City Museum.

Colin Laferty at the 'Computer Society' stand, Student Societies Day UCG (NUIG), Sept 1980

Memories of the Lisdoonvarna Folk Festival

Ireland's first weekend youth musical festival took place during the summer of 1978 in what was then a backwater- Lisdoonvarna in County Clare. Thanks to the foresight of Jim Shannon and Paddy Doherty, it was the Electric Picnic of its time & an Irish equivalent of Woodstock.
The festival was billed as a Folk Festival. But though it started as an upbeat all-Irish Feilé, it expanded its repertoire over the years and hosted some of the finest musical acts on the planet including Jackson Browne, Van Morrison,  Rory Gallagher, Emmylou Harris and Planxty.

Maria O'Malley from UCG & Mayo at Lisdoonvarna, 1978

The  scene that greeted arrivals was a countryside of stone walls, small fields and narrow botharíns. But from this unlikely landscape sprung forth a huge tent city populated by amongst others, students, German hippies (from Clare & south Galway), Irish trad aficionados, Hells Angels, Hare Krishnas, left wing revolutionaries... Of course with so much young people on one site, undercover cops were also present, making the odd arrest for possession of hash etc.

Largely peaceful, the 1983 festival was marred by eight drowning fatalities at nearby Tra Leathan and by the violence that broke out when Hells Angels, inexplicably hired as festival security(!), started to beat up some of the festival goers. Thus ended a magical festival that corresponded too and reflected much of my fun  student days and my political awakening.

For me, my happiest memory was in 1981 when Irish supergrpup Moving Hearts (Christy Moore, Davy Spillane, Declan Sinnott...) played highly politicized songs from their album of the same name. Songs such as 'No Time for Love', 'Hiroshima Nagasak'i and 'Before the Deluge' reflected the conflict in Northern Ireland, the H-Blocks, the early global environmental and the anti-war movements that were a largely youthful response to the real threat of mass annihilation that could have emanated from the 'Nuclear Arms Race' then taking place between the USSR and the USA.