THE Kilrush Tidy Towns Committee may be regretting being so helpful to their counterparts in Listowel, when a delegation from the North Kerry town visited West Clare last spring.
The Kerry group arrived in Kilrush, cap in hand, wondering aloud as to the secret behind their hosts’ 2014 win in Ireland’s Tidiest Small Town category.
Led by their chairman, Paul Edson, the Kilrush committee were ever so helpful and sang like canaries. Imagine their shock on Monday, when they learned they had been knocked off their perch by none other than Listowel, who improved their 2014 total by 11 points.
“We must have given them too much information because they went and dethroned us, the cute hoors,” Paul Edson laughed ruefully.
Kilrush did finish second in their category and picked by their eighth successive Tidy Towns gold medal, so it wasn’t exactly a nightmare week for them.
“Murt Collins, our vice-chairman, is a Kerry man and he knows the Listowel crowd well. There has always been a friendly rivalry between us,” Mr Edson added, although he was unsure if the Kilrush committee will now insist on hopping on the Killimer-Tarbert ferry, visiting Listowel and pumping them for prize-winning information.
Just last week, Kilrush won an Entente Florale gold medal and their Tidy Town’s tally this week was only three points adrift of Letterkenny, the national winner. However, 19 towns and villages finished no more than three points shy of the Donegal town.
“To stay consistently winning the gold medal is a marvellous achievement. We’re second in our category but we’re quite confident that we’ll regain that title again in the near future. We always felt that this year would be a kind of holding year. If we kept a good mark then next year we’d get the reward for our Entente Florale performance,” Mr Edson maintained.
By Peter O’Connell
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.