Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: Catherine & Joseph Kelly, (Bowling Green), (Anniv).
11.00: Cyril Duncan, (Anniv).
6.30: Martin Ryan., (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

Eight fatalities in a single crash is the highest on our roads since records began. The fact that so many of the casualties were so young intensifies the sense of tragedy and waste. What cemented the friendship of the seven young men was a shared love of cars, apparently. The fast car is a common obsession among young males, an unlikely agent of 'male bonding'. The whole male culture surrounding car rallying is driven by the same dynamic. On one level, this is all harmless stuff. But, on another level, a menacing cloud of recklessness hangs over the whole proceedings. Because, unfortunately, in reckless young hands, the car is also a very dangerous weapon, far more lethal than any loaded gun. This tragic reality was dramatically highlighted this week. The brevity of life was exposed in a very raw manner.

Earlier this month, a fascinating hoard of 52,000 Roman coins went on display in the British Museum in London. The treasure had been found last April in Somerset by a man using a metal detector. The coins were contained in a ceramic pot 18 inches in diameter (right), and date from AD 253 to 305. It was buried a mere 14 inches down. The hoard contained the only coins to be minted in Britain by a Roman Emperor.

We can almost imagine our way back into that period in which those coins were minted. Because so much of what we regard as our civilisation has been shaped by Roman art, law and the Latin language.

This week too we saw the publication of another 'discovery': a photo of the sky taken with the new European telescope. It was rather beautiful: an elongated eggshape in attractive purple, blue and pink hues. At the top and bottom were specks caused by background microwave radiation, the remnants of the first light that appeared 380,000 years after the 'Big Bang'. It is far more difficult to make the leap of imagination back to this period, because we are back more than 13½ billion years ago. Our life really is less than the flick of an eyelid. The psalmist got it right:
A thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone
No more than a watch in the night.

People have always been acutely aware of the shortness of life. Saint Bede likened it to the flight of a bird across a darkened hall. Vast stretches of time behind us or not, time still matters. We want to catch that bus. It still matters that the task we have set ourselves for the day gets done. Time still matters to parents who are anxiously waiting for a teenager to arrive home.

We are the product of a long period of evolution. Millions of species have lived, and died out. But this doesn't alter in the slightest way our sense that we are at once totally insignificant, and yet hugely important.

Modern scientific discoveries instill in us an astonishment and wonder in the face of our vast universe - and there is more to come. But every moment of our life remains precious, and every human life is at once dust, and potential glory. 'The long view' intensives rather than diminishes the Inishowen tragedy.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Interest

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

----------------------------------------------

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

-Philip Larkin.

Matt O'Flaherty, RIP

Matt O'Flaherty died suddenly at his home in Bearna on Tuesday last. He has had heart problems over the years, but they rarely interfered with his very active lifestyle. On the contrary: it was probably due to his medical condition that he became an inveterate walker and he was a familiar figure pounding the paving stones on the Prom in Salthill.

He was one of the best-known figures in the city and he had wide business interests. His central interest was, of course, the chain of pharmacies which he built up over his many years in the city. He set up his first outlet in the fledgling Galway Shopping Centre on the Headford Road some forty years ago, in the early 1970s. This proved to be the springboard for his remarkable success in the business.

Matt was born in Achill Island eighty years ago. He was reared in Roscommon, was educated in Garbally College, Ballinasloe and qualified in the College of Pharmacy, Dublin. He began working as a pharmacist, first in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, and later as chief pharmacist in Crumlin Hospital, Dublin. During this time, he met and married Deirdre Maxwell from County Westmeath. In 1958 they moved to Galway where Matt worked as a sales representative for a medical firm for some years.

With time, he found it increasingly difficult to dovetail the demands of a growing young family with the nomadic lifestyle of a sales rep. This led to his decision to 'settle down' in the new Galway Shopping Centre in the early 1970's. He took his chances and the rest, as they say, is history!

Matt's 'hinterland' was the St. Vincent de Paul Society. He had a keen, nuanced social conscience. This prompted him to do a Diploma in Political and Economic Science in U.C.G. Subsequently, he devoted every spare moment he had to the cause. He served two terms as Galway Area President, the only person ever to serve for two terms in that office. He later became Regional President. He placed his considerable business acumen and skills at the disposal of the society to great effect. For example, the Social Housing in Nun's Island was developed on his watch, as was the Curiosity Shop on Merchant's Road.

While he was a able administrator in the Society, he didn't neglect the more mundane duties of every SVdeP 'footsoldier': home visitations.

The Vincent de Paul Galway headquarters is of course across the road from us in Ozanam House. During Matt's active years in the society he was a regular visitor to the Augustinian Church. He was an affable, laid-back individual who engaged easily with people of every vintage! He had a wonderful sense of humour which seems to have given him a healthy perspective on the many projects he was involved in. His very busy life never deprived him of his natural, easy-going demeanour. It was always a source of wonder to me that one man could have so may irons in the fire at one time, and still remain unflappable.

Despite his business and 'extra-curricular' activities, Matt was primarily a family man. He neither smoked or drank, and he tended to take his recreation with his large family. They lived in that large house at the west end of the Millennium Bridge in Newcastle up to about four years ago. Matt and Deirdre then moved out to Barna where he died on Tuesday last. He was a mighty man! May he rest in peace.

"Artists on Art...

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