Home » Regional » North Clare (page 23)

North Clare

A cold and damp caravan to call home

A NORTH Clare couple and their four young children are among the 6,239 people currently seeking accommodation in Clare. James Sherlock and his partner, Caroline Sherlock, have been living in a caravan at the front of Caroline’s family’s home in Ennistymon for the past year and a half. Now with four children, aged between four years and four weeks, the couple are at their wits’ end. “We have to go into my parents’ house to use the toilet, the shower and to do any cooking. Even at night, if my daughter wants to go to the toilet, we have to go out in the rain to get to the toilet in the house,” Caroline outlined. The family found this summer especially difficult because of the wet weather and are dreading the winter. “Like all children, they just want to play outside but, basically, they have been stuck in here,” Caroline said, indicating the one-room caravan. The caravan does not have …

Read More »

Inagh woman’s Calais crusade

SHOCKING television images of the migrant crisis in Calais has spurred one Clare woman into dramatic action. A conversation at the end of last week between Inagh’s Róisín Ní Gháirbhith and a friend of hers in Cork about the situation at the French port has now turned into a national humanitarian aid convoy involving two trucks, 10 vans, two camper vans, six cars and 40 volunteers. Desperate migrants from North Africa and the Middle East have been travelling to Calais in an effort to enter the UK. Some have attempted to walk the 31-mile Channel Tunnel, while others try to stow away on trucks using the Eurotunnel or on ships travelling from the port. Others try to climb aboard the Eurostar train. Now Calais is home to large, poorly-equipped camps and an estimated 3,000 migrants, mainly men and boys, many of whom paid large sums to people smugglers to get there. “I was watching all this on television and reading …

Read More »

Minke whale carcass not a health hazard

A whale that washed up on the North Clare coast last week will be left for “nature to take its course”, Clare County Council has confirmed. The body of the 6m-long adult female minke whale washed up on the Liscannor shore on Wednesday last. “In terms of disposal, that would normally fall under the local authority. This whale would be difficult to recover because it is a stony beach so you can’t bury it and it would be hard to bring it out. “It is not near houses and it is not on a popular beach so it is not a health hazard but we would still advise people not to touch it. It is expensive to recover whales and take them to an incinerator so we would see it as a waste of resources when it is not posing a risk,” Simon Berrow, chief science officer of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group said (IWDG). According to the local authority, …

Read More »

Ennistymon mart site burial claims in affadivit

A discount supermarket should not be built in a North Clare town because part of the proposed site may have been used as a children’s burial ground, objectors to the project have claimed. Aldi Stores Ireland Ltd was granted permission by Clare County Council last month to demolish Ennistymon Mart and build a single-storey discount foodstore on the site. Now, the Save Ennistymon Mart Committee has submitted an affidavit, sworn by one of its members, to An Bord Pleanála claiming a woman who had lived in the town “had arranged for a priest to bless a part of the Fair Green below Doherty’s gate under which…the bodies of small children had been buried”. “These were unbaptised children whom the Catholic Church did not allow to be buried inside the grounds of the church and graveyard, which is nearby,” the affidavit from local farmer Tom Clair states. The group has opposed the closure and sale of Ennistymon Mart since it was …

Read More »

Liscannor ‘geyser’ of sewage

A ‘geyser’ of raw sewage was spotted gushing from a sewer pipe in a North Clare seaside village last week. The incident  happened at Liscannor on the Wild Atlantic Way on Wednesday and according to locals, the sewerage scheme in the area is so bad that it gets blocked up “about once every two weeks”. Patrick Blake of Liscannor Harbour Amenity Organisation described the scene in the seaside village on Wednesday morning. “When we saw the sewage geyser first, it was 20 feet high. It was around 11 o’clock and it took us about 20 minutes or a half an hour to get someone to take a photograph of it and, by that stage, it had gone down to about 10 or 11 feet,” he explained. “There was a group of people there in white coats and they said they were agents for Irish Water,” he continued. When contacted by The Clare Champion, a spokesperson for Irish Water stated that …

Read More »

Get involved with Moy Hill Garden

FERGAL Smith was destined to turn his hand to growing vegetables and various fruits at some stage. Living in North Clare for eight years, the Mayo man grew up on an organic vegetable farm before embarking on a professional surfing career for several years. These days, he is one of the key figures behind the operation of the Moy Hill Community Garden project, which is located close to Lahinch. The project has entered the Get Involved initiative, a competition run by 51 local newspapers throughout Ireland. The aim is that the national competition will drive voluntary sustainability projects, where local people collectively play a more proactive, inclusive and coherent role in shaping the future of their local environs. Before setting in Lahinch, Fergal learned his trade further up the west coast. “My dad is an organic vegetable farmer. He’s been at it 30 years. He started the country markets in Westport. So, I grew up with that. He got into …

Read More »
University Hospital Limerick.

Injured woman removed to hospital

A woman is recovering in hospital after she sustained a head injury when she slipped on rocks at Clahanes, near Liscannor, yesterday evening. The woman in her 50’s had been walking along the shoreline when the accident happened. The alarm was raised by a passerby who called the ambulance service. The Irish Coast Guard was requested to assist and the Doolin unit of the volunteer service assisted paramedics recover the patient and take her across the rocks to a waiting ambulance before being removed to University Hospital Limerick.

Read More »

Council employees have no time for lunch

SUCH is the workload of the significantly reduced number of people working out of the Clare County Council office in Ennistymon, it has been claimed that the three people employed there don’t have time to take a lunch break. Councillor Richard Nagle told the meeting of the West Clare Municipal District in Kilrush that it is virtually impossible for the staff there to provide a complete service to the people of North Clare, despite their best efforts. He predicted a “calamity” if this issue is not addressed. Councillor Nagle forwarded a motion at the meeting requesting that Clare County Council review staffing levels at the Ennistymon Municipal District offices. “I am not suggesting that officers in Ennistymon are not working efficiently. They certainly are. They are being put under intolerable pressure. If I wish to speak to somebody, I won’t ring. I’ll drive in because they are so busy in there that they simply haven’t time to be dealing with …

Read More »