THE Connaught Telegraph, which clattered to life in Castlebar on an ancient hand set flat bed press in 1828, is probably the oldest newspaper in the country.
Actually, it may go back to 1808 because a Mayo paper started that year was incorporated into the Telegraph when it was founded by Lord Frederick Cavendish, an English Protestant who fiercely espoused the nationalist cause and became a champion of the Irish peasantry.
By 1845, the Telegraph was reporting on the Famine, which Cavendish had uncannily prefigured in an editorial 12 years earlier. "Though milk and honey still abound in Ireland, they flow for the Saxon and the stranger and not for the natives of the land", he wrote.
No longer a creature of hot lead technology driven by noisy linotypes, the Telegraph recently emerged in a fresh image, and form to take up residence in its new home - appropriately located in Cavendish Lane. Like almost all newspapers of the new age, the Telegraph is now gestated every week in a newsroom where video display units glow and the silence is disturbed only by the barely audible click of computer keys and the occasional swearing of a reporter stuck for an opening sentence.
President Mary Robinson was no doubt aware of a personal connection with the paper when she performed the opening ceremony in the new building.
The President, one of the Mayo Bourkes, is related to the Telegraph's most renowned editor, James Daly, who, some claim, was an even greater influence than Michael Davitt in founding the Land League.
When Daly took over the paper in 1876, it was already regarded as one of Ireland's most radical journals and he enhanced the tradition with a colourful line in editorial invective. "A good landlord is as rare as a white blackbird", he wrote in one of his many attacks on the gentry, whom he called "unconvicted land robbers".
Of one of the best known he wrote: "Lord Lucan has been distributing Christmas cards amongst his Kilmeena tenants in the shape of ejectments for non payment of rent." Another time he dismissed them in these words: "You can see into their brains through, the prisms of their tongues.
The Gillespie family of Castlebar has been connected with the Telegraph since the Cavendish days, the first of them, Richard C. Gillespie, acquiring it from Daly in 1892. The Gillespies have been running the paper ever since and the latest editor is Tom Gillespie who took over after the sad and unexpected death at an early age of Tom Courell, one of Ireland's most popular newspapermen. On its newly designed front page title, the Telegraph still carries its original motto, to which any good newspaper should aspire: "Be Just And Fear Not."
IT has occasionally been asserted that the Abbey could never be considered a truly national theatre as long as it determinedly stayed put in Dublin, hardly ever venturing into the terra incognita beyond Chapelizod. A visit to Moscow yes, but Belmullet never.
If you lived in the farthest reaches of south west Kerry and wanted to see a play by your countyman, John B. Keane, on the Abbey boards, it would take a long day's travelling, an overnight stay and a lot of money. With the help of a jet, a Muscovite could get there almost as fast.
But things are changing and there are heartening signs that the Abbey may be turning into a moveable feast. For starters, it's bringing its production of Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme to Galway's new Town Hall Theatre tomorrow, beginning a five night run.
In the 23 years I've lived in Galway, visitations by the Abbey company have been about as frequent as lottery wins. It seems to me that Galway's own Druid troupe has undertaken more safaris into the hinterland than its august Dublin big brother, once even staging The Playboy on the Aran Islands.
The smoke will hardly have cleared over The Somme when the Abbey returns to the Galway Town Hall on May 18th, with its production of Synge's The Well Of The Saints. Two visits inside a month - amazing. You have to wonder if Galway's Michael D., arts angel extraordinaire, has had a hand in the Abbey's new wanderlust.
Whatever the reason, the manager of the Town Hall, Michael Diskin, is thrilled at the development which can only help put bums on seats. "It makes my life and the life of any regional theatre manager easier to be able to count on shows of such a high calibre coming to your venue," Diskin says.
The Abbey gets huge subsidies from the taxpayer so nobody should complain if its productions are made more easily accessible by regular visits down the country. That way the Abbey can really be regarded as truly a national theatre.
To complete the happiness of Diskin and Galway theatre lovers, Rough Magic is bringing its production of Stewart Parker's Pentecost to the Town Hall next month.
AS I will shortly be vacating this space for good, I can hardly leave without mentioning Mullaghmore. Remember Mullaghmore, the blessed mountain of the Burren? Well, it's still there, undesecrated by the hideousness of an interpretative centre. It's not out of danger yet though. The foundation works for the centre are still in place on the mountain despite promises a year ago from the Government that they would be removed and Mullaghmore would be restored to its natural state.
It has not been so restored and certain circumstances - a change of government, say - could result in the interpretative centre going up after all. A final and presumably definitive statement is due next month from the Government on its plans to develop a national park in the Burren and the Heritage Council may add a coda to the recommendations.
The draft plan, available for public consultation over the past couple of months, suggests dispersing small scale visiting facilities around the Burren and says there's no need for one mammoth interpretative centre. Yet it doesn't entirely close off that possibility because it suggests that maybe staff accommodation, a car park and toilets could be provided on the Mullaghmore site. Now there's the thin end of a wedge if ever I saw one.