Two years ago, in May 2024, a homeless man named Victor Spaggiari died in Galway aged 65. Spaggiari had been a familiar face in Galway city. Day after day, year after year, he would sit on a long wooden bench in a corner of the city’s covered Cornstore Mall. He wouldn’t say much, but he was a learned man; often he would take books – archaeology and folklore were particular interests of his – from the shelves outside Charlie Byrne’s bookshop to read during the day, returning them before he left.
When his parents died more than 10 years ago, Spaggiari became the principal heir to their combined fortune. It would have made him a millionaire. But he never claimed it; instead he spent his final decade living in a homeless hostel in Galway.
Intrigued by that bare outline of the Italian man’s unusual life story, Rosita Boland and Naomi O’Leary spent some time with those who knew him in Galway and tracked down his closest living relative – a cousin in Italy. In the resulting account of his life, our reporters pore over essays he wrote as a child (“I never considered money to be an important thing, and I don’t think any intelligent person should,” he wrote as a 14-year-old in Milan in 1975), his relationship with his parents and the journey that brought him to Ireland. It’s a moving reflection on material life and Spaggiari’s rejection of it. “There was nothing conventional about Victor,” says Paudie Cunningham of Cope Galway. “He was an enigma; a very private man… He wasn’t in touch with society at all. He was living in his own head.”
The domestic story of the week was the publication of the Government’s budget for next year – an €8.5 billion package that has been denounced for being miserly and profligate, depending on the critic’s perspective. In this behind-the-scenes retelling of the negotiations leading to Tuesday’s announcement, drawing on 20 interviews with people involved, Pat Leahy and Jack Horgan-Jones give a great sense of the personal dynamics behind the process. Among its cast are the combustible Patrick O’Donovan, the ideological Jack Chambers, the tired Simon Harris and a line-up of insiders who have much more flair for language when speaking anonymously than they ever do in their public pronouncements. “Paschal [Donohoe] killed you with kindness. Jack just kills you,” says one. And another: “Politicians looking for credit should always remember that it’s a very short distance between a clap on the back and a kick up the hole.”
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Leahy’s column argues that the hawkish Chambers has emerged from the week with his standing enhanced. Our editorial says this annual budget ritual is a bad way to run a country, citing the debacle over an effective cut to RTÉ’s funding – apparently the result of political gamesmanship more than any point of principle – as an example of its flaws.
In our World section, Rachel Lavin and Hannah McCarthy draw on satellite imagery and interviews with people on the ground to find out what became of Gaza’s football pitches, most of which are now in ruins.
In Opinion, Mark O’Connell reflects on former minister for housing Simon Coveney’s role as a lobbyist for the developer Johnny Ronan and what it tells us about the business and politics of housing in Ireland. Siobhán Fenton, a former Sinn Féin press officer, suggests that party might have an ulterior motive for its actions at Drumcree, while Ed Abrahamson writes that October 7th was a piercing, shrieking alarm call for all Jews.
One of my favourite running jokes in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is about the son, Caleb Lambert’s hobby – surveillance – and how it complicates family life. That novel was published 25 years ago, when the idea of using technology to watch your loved ones’ every move could in itself be a joke. Not today. As Patrick Freyne explains, the ubiquity of location-sharing tech has made it acceptable and normal for everyone from anxious parents to suspicious partners to follow the every move of those closest to them. But what, Freyne asks, does that mean for our privacy, our trust and our relationships?
The site is full of strong interviews this weekend, including conversations with David Clifford, Simon Zebo, Fontaines DC and Jordan Joy Hewson, who talks about her move into music and growing up as Bono’s daughter.
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Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
