Lifestyle

Following on from The Clare Champion’s series of articles about parents of children in care, Nicola Corless speaks to people involved in foster care about the system and the fostering experience in the county

ANN Marie Bryan is a working mother with three sons, living in Quin with her husband, who works in Shannon. Ann Marie herself has a new job in Ennis and every morning she brings her three sons to school in Clarecastle.None of this is particularly unusual, in fact it’s very ordinary but it’s not really the type of lifestyle most people would expect a young woman from the Travelling community to have.Ann Marie had a variety of jobs before late last year when she took up her position as a regional reporter with the Voice of the Traveller magazine, a publication that’s trying to get closer to the constituency it serves.“There have been five regional journalists taken on to get involved in getting information for the magazine. I’m contacting Traveller organisations and getting information from them and submitting it. The magazine is for Travellers, it’s about Travellers, it’s all over the country,” Ann Marie explains.She says there is a lot …

A CRUSHEEN resident is playing a difficult waiting game for a new kidney after starting hospital dialysis in Limerick at the beginning of the year.Barbara Muldoon-Ting has a few more health checks to complete before she is added to the kidney transplant list and could face a wait of up to two years or more on haemodialysis.Having moved to a housing estate near the church in Crusheen in December 2007 with her husband Simon Ting, who is from Hong Kong, Barbara started haemodialysis in the Mid-Western Regional Hospital, Limerick on January 4 last and moved over to the Fresenius dialysis unit on the Dock Road in Limerick on January 18.A native of Longford, she has to get dialysis three times a week for four hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 7am to 11am, which can be tiring, as her blood count is low at the moment. Problems with her kidneys started in 1987. She had a renal operation and …

As internet shopping comes into its own, Nicola Corless talks to the woman behind Irish website Dresses.ie about changing attitudes to buying online

STUDENTS at St Joseph’s Education Centre in Ennis received certificates for courses they had completed during the year this week.

Newmarket-on-Fergus will see an influx of ploughing enthusiasts this weekend for the Clare Ploughing Championships.

THE passing of a Home Rule Bill in Westminster did nothing to calm the situation in Ireland in the years following the 1916 Rebellion. The Irish Republican Army began to agitate for freedom and their early targets were the Royal Irish Constabulary. It is generally accepted that the first event in the War of Independence was an attack on the RIC at Soloheadbeg but there had been an earlier attack on a barracks outside Castleisland. By mid-1920, 55 members of the RIC had been killed, 16 barracks had been destroyed and hundreds of them abandoned. As a result, its numbers and morale dropped and they did not control great parts of the country. The Government would not recognise the campaign as war but rather as terrorism and so continued to rely on the RIC, even though there were plenty of army bases in the country. They equipped the RIC with arms and transport but by early 1920, it was obvious …

A KILMALEY man has become one of two people in Ireland to receive a prestigious scholarship to study at the University of Notre Dame in the United States.