Arrests a blip on good weekend

KILRUSH gardaí have confirmed that 10 people were arrested in Kilkee on the Saturday and Sunday night of the bank holiday weekend, following a spate of public order offences in the West Clare resort town.

Six of those arrested were apprehended on the Saturday night, while a local man was also hospitalised following an incident in the Marian Estate in the early hours of Sunday morning.
The man’s wife had her handbag snatched and, in the ensuing struggle, her husband hit his head off the footpath and sustained a cut to his head.
A number of people were interviewed afterwards by Kilrush gardaí and a file has been sent to the DPP.
Mayor of Kilkee, Lily Marrinan-Sullivan told The Clare Champion that a minority of weekend visitors to the town caused trouble.
“The vast majority of people who came to Kilkee last weekend came to have a good time. But we had an element in Kilkee that we wouldn’t like to see there again. Some people have taken the option of renting holiday homes, maybe not always doing it themselves but having others do it for them. What I do know is there were problems in Kilkee. There were a number of incidences which people found to be very unnerving,” Councillor Marrinan Sullivan stated.
The town mayor believes that there was a sufficient garda presence in Kilkee throughout the weekend.
“Whether there’s enough guards to deal with any situation in Ireland at the moment, I don’t know. I think it’s a national thing. I don’t think there’s enough guards in general in the country to deal with some of the behaviour of people. But I certainly saw a fairly high presence of guards in Kilkee. I certainly saw the paddywagon, I definitely saw at least one unmarked car and I saw at least two squad cars. And the guards seemed to be out on the street,” she recalled.
While Councillor Marrinan Sullivan says that she didn’t witness any trouble herself, she maintains that some visitors didn’t adhere to the law.
“It was a beautiful weekend and we had a huge amount of people in Kilkee. We had an element within those visitors who came into the town and thought they could behave whatever way they wanted to and it certainly did cause problems,” she concluded.