News

PLANS for the €40 million Shannon Bridge Crossing are heading for choppy waters after a well known environmental campaigner confirmed his intention to seek a judicial review over environmental concerns.

  IN a week that has been marked by tales of a serious fodder shortage, Querrin farmer Daithí Scanlan has apparently eschewed convention. An array of recently harvested round bales are visible in Tarmon East, near Poulnasherry Bay. The only problem is that the field is too wet to allow Daithí to extract his newly minted round bales. “A picture can tell a thousand words but maybe not this time. They’re not great bales. You’d want a helicopter to get them out,” he laughed, when describing the quality of his out-of-season hay. “It was hay that I hadn’t cut last year. We got a chance to cut it and bale it recently but we couldn’t take them out of the field then, it got so wet again.” He doesn’t think the bales would be devoured by his cattle, even if he could remove them from the sodden field. “I don’t think you could use them, it got so wet. I …

THE local planning authority is opposing plans for the development of a €100m 40-turbine windfarm in West Clare, it has emerged.

KILRUSH will host no fewer than 43 ambassadors on Sunday, May 12, when President Michael D Higgins visits the town for the 2013 National Famine Commemoration.

ONE of the Clare’s oldest landmark pubs, Durty Nelly’s in Bunratty, which was once valued at €12.5m, has been taken over by Dubliners Martin Scully and Mary McCoy.

The number of dead animals collected in Clare as the result of the worst fodder crisis in living memory has increased by an estimated 60% this year, according to a local farm leader.

THE Hughes & Hughes bookshop in Ennis will operate as an Eason franchise from next month.

Ireland’s first long-distance touring route, the Wild Atlantic Way, is “bound to have an economic spin off” in Clare, according to one TD here. The drive stretches from Donegal to Cork, with details of the route announced this week incorporating the Clare coast from the Galway border to the Killimer ferry.