Lifestyle

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  FROM his neat, pink house in Legard South, Paddy Casey can hear the waves thundering towards the shore in Spanish Point. As a young man, there wasn’t an inch of the beach that he didn’t know and for 16 years he utilised that knowledge to save at least 10 lives between 1944 and 1962. “I’m on the run in to 90,” he replied, when the question of his current year count was broached.About 10 years before Paddy became a lifeguard in Spanish Point, a local committee set about collecting money, with a view to buying basic lifesaving equipment. Paddy has, in his possession, a document put together by Jane Hurley, who details the tragedy which led to the establishment of a lifeguard station on the scenic West Clare beach. “The Indian summer of 1934 tempted many bathers into the calm waters of Spanish Point. Saturday, September 15 was a particularly pleasant day. A sister from the local Convent of …

THE Bunratty International Chess Festival has been held every February for the past 20 years, initially in The Shannon Shamrock Hotel and now more recently in the Bunratty Castle Hotel.

IT is just six weeks until 2013’s Miss Clare will be crowned and organisers are calling on young women around the county to enter before the St Valentine’s Day deadline.

Daniel O’Connell has always been known as a pacifist and opposed to force of any description. Indeed it is sometimes felt that it led to the failure of the Repeal Movement, when he backed down after the government banned the final Clontarf rally. It also led to many of the Young Irelanders becoming disenchanted with him in later years. However such might not always have been the case.

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WHILE people of the same religious views have congregated together for thousands of years, it’s relatively new for people who are opposed to the power of organised religion to come together.

FOLLOWING early mass on the morning of Sunday, February 20, 1921 Aiden, Cecil and Thomas O’Donovan decided to walk from their home at Emma Villas, in Thomondgate, to Blackwater Mill in Parteen. The purpose of their journey was to search for birds’ nests in the ruins of the mill.