Tag Archives: shannon

AN Bord Pleanála has again rejected an appeal from Aldi to overrule Clare County Council and allow the development of a new store and cafe/restaurant opposite Shannon’s Town Centre. There has been considerable local support for allowing Aldi to go ahead with the development, with a lot of frustration about the lack of development in Shannon in recent years. However, Clare County Council and An Bord Pleanála have both now ruled twice against Aldi, with the project not having advanced at all since the first planning application was lodged more than five years ago. An Bord Pleanála inspector Adrian Ormsyby reviewed Clare County Council’s decision to again reject Aldi’s application. While he disagreed with the Council’s contention that the development should not be allowed on grounds of zoning or lack of pedestrian links to the existing Town Centre, he was still against it being given the green light. In the report he stated, “Having regard to the prominent location of …

AFTER many years as a youth worker serving Shannon, Thomas O’Hara is moving into the world of academia. Thomas, who worked with Clare Youth Service in Shannon from 2006 to 2008, and again from 2011 until this year is taking up a position with TUS in Limerick (formerly Limerick Institute of Technology). Speaking to the Champion, he said he had really enjoyed working with the young people of the town, and found the level of community spirit in Shannon to be very strong. “The people there, the sense of community is absolutely amazing. Once people find out you are doing anything in the area they’re very quick to support it, I’ve found, and that was always an advantage to me in working with young people.” “It was a great way of showing young people how community supports itself, how to get involved in your community. “Sometimes that’s one of the key things for young people; where do I fit into …

DAMIAN O’Rourke has organised a number of live performances at the Swive Stage in Shannon Town Centre. “We had the first one on September 7, the next one will be on the 21st and it’s every second Wednesday until October 19,” said Damian.  He said it is following on from the Wings festival, which was held in the summer. “We had a good reaction to that and this ties in with Phase 4 of the Live Local Performance Scheme  from the County Council. Instead of doing one big event I thought it’d be nice to have a continual thing, where people can come mid-week and look forward to the next one.” There will be a diversity of performers, he added. “The first night we had two acts, the next three events we will have three performers per night. There will be a nice mix of poetry, music, storytelling, tunes, songs and stuff. There will be an array of performers that …

AN Taoiseach Micheál Martin was in Shannon today for the official opening of MeiraGTx Holdings new manufacturing facility. The facility, online since earlier this year and stretching over 150,000 square feet, is the first commercial-scale gene therapy manufacturing site in Ireland. It currently employs around 100, but there is potential for that to increase to 300. The MeiraGTx site contains three facilities, one built to be flexible and scalable for viral vector production for clinical and commercial supply, in addition, there is a facility to manufacture plasmid DNA – the critical starting material for producing gene therapy products – and thirdly, a Quality Control (QC) hub performing advanced biochemical quality control testing for MeiraGTx clinical and commercial programmes. The formal unveiling marks a critical step in MeiraGTx’s mission to develop and deliver potentially curative treatments for patients living with serious diseases. The Shannon site allows MeiraGTx to accelerate the development and delivery of gene therapy treatments to patients facing a …

WITH many older people relying on relatively modest pensions, the upcoming winter is going to be a very difficult one, warned Shannon’s Kay Murphy, the former national President of Active Retirement Ireland. “Of course it will be, sure where are they going to get the money to heat their houses this winter? “Electricity has gone up several times, gas has gone up more, oil has gone up a lot in price. Those are all sources of energy they use to heat their homes with and to cook with,” she said. Kay said that many older people struggled during the last two winters, before the energy crisis that has been emerging. “As you know older people were cocooning in 2020 and 2021 and into 2022. We stayed at home all those winters, and Active Retirement Ireland were inundated with people who were at home alone, putting on extra clothes, putting on overcoats, wrapping themselves in blankets because they couldn’t afford to …

FAMILIAR to many through Shannon Musical Society, Aodán Fox is taking on a new challenge this month. Muse Productions is bringing a one man show, A Night In November, to the Hope Cafe, and it will run for three nights, September 15, 16 and 17, with Aodán the star of the show. Readers of a certain age will remember the clash of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland soccer teams at Windsor Park in 1993, on a night when Loyalist animosity created a hateful, frightening atmosphere.  The play’s title is a reference to the night of that match, and the atmosphere on the night leads to Kenneth Norman McAllister, a Protestant who has previously taken anti-Catholic prejudices for granted, questioning his beliefs and his identity. Aodán said that while he was initially dubious about taking on yet another project, he was sold as soon as he saw the script. “Martin (McNelis)  saw the original version in Limerick years ago …

FRIDAY, September 16, will see the Clare launch of former IRA prisoner Jim (Jaz) McCann’s memoir 6,000 Days at the Oakwood Hotel. On the night the author will be in conversation with Donna McGettigan. Arrested at the age of 20 after attempting to kill a police officer, McCann was sentenced to life imprisonment and he remained in custody from 1976 until 1994. He was one of hundreds of Republican prisoners who refused to wear a prison uniform, claiming they were political prionsers, which led to them being locked in their cells, wearing only a blanket, for more than four years, in grim conditions. The death of the hunger strikers in 1981 was a huge historical moment, and he knew several of them. In the book he also recalls life in the IRA, the deprivation of the years spent in prison, the relationships with friends and comrades including the hunger strikers, his role in the prison breakout of 1983 which saw …

A PERMANENT marker has been put in place in the townland of Killula, close to Shannon Airport, to commemorate a 1961 plane crash in which four people were killed. The crash happened early on the morning of January 27, 1961, when an air corps De Havilland DH.104 Dove crashed while on a training exercise. There were five people on board, four of whom were killed. A person involved in the preparations for Tuesday’s event said, “The air corps are laying a marker stone on a site where an Air Corps plane crashed in 1961, four people lost their lives in that crash, it was on the approach to Shannon, in a place called Killula, on the way in. “There was a temporary marker on the site but they’ve put on a permanent one, and they came down to do that on Tuesday.” He said that the crash saw the deaths of two air corps pilots and two air traffic control …