News

A SOUTH-East Clare publican has vowed to drop the price of a pint to just €3, in a desperate bid to halt a dramatic 40% decline in business over the past year.The proprietor of The Mill Bar in O’Briensbridge, Kathleen Sciascia, actually closed her pub early at 10.30pm on Monday night because there were no customers.Concerned about the fall off in business over the summer months, Ms Sciacsia, who employs eight full-time and six part-time staff, has warned that if trade doesn’t improve she will be forced to curtail working hours for employees and rates of pay.

WITH a month left to go until the second Lisbon vote, it’s looking like the yes side will reverse last year’s result and this week, the Ireland for Europe group launched their Clare campaign. Former hurling star, Brian Lohan lent his support to the launch, which was held in Shannon on Wednesday but declined to speak about the upcoming poll. Scariff based Michael McNamara – who ran as an independent candidate in June’s European election – was also at the launch and he said the referendum hasn’t been won yet. “I’m very hopeful that it will pass but there’s no room for complacency. It is a very difficult document to sell and I think we have a large absence of trust in the country at the moment. There are no moral forces that are trusted any more. Politics is crumbling, the church has its problems and people are very reluctant to trust anybody. And people are very disenchanted, they’re unhappy …

EVEN in death, the late Dr Brendan O’Regan can be a peacemaker and bring rival neighbours Clare and Limerick closer together by naming the €500 million Shannon tunnel-connection in his honour.So says Clare Fine Gael Deputy, Pat Breen, and his suggestion would have the support of the Irish Peace Institute, which was one of the conflict resolution bodies founded by the late Dr O’Regan.

A MULTI-million-euro housing development, which if it goes ahead will be the biggest to date in the mid-Clare village of Sixmilebridge, was given the green light this week after an appeal to An Bord Pleanála failed. The application for 223 homes in Sixmilebridge was granted planning permission in October 2008 by Clare County Council, a decision affirmed by An Bord Pleanála subject to revised conditions. The original application was for 233 homes, comprising six three-bedroom detached houses, three four-bedroom detached homes, 38 three-bedroom semi-detached houses, 25 three-bedroom townhouses, 75 two-bedroom duplex units, 22 three-bedroom duplex units, 10 three-bedroom stepdown garden apartment units, 34 two-bedroom garden apartment units and 10 one-bedroom garden apartment units. However, An Bord Pleanála, as one of its conditions, scaled down the development omitting 26 housing units, bringing the total number of homes in the proposed development to 197.  

MEMBERS of Clare’s three Community Development Projects will this week march alongside their colleagues from across the country at Liberty Hall in Dublin having come out against the possible implementation of the McCarthy Report.

WITH the stroke of a pen someone in Dublin can wreak devastation for the vulnerable members of Clare’s rural community by signing off on the rural transport programme.That’s the opinion of Councillor PJ Ryan, who stressed that the community-based transport service responds to the needs of today. It keeps communities alive and, if anything, the network needs to be more extensive rather than faced with fighting for what they have, he said.

PAY cuts and redundancies may be in the offing for Aer Lingus staff at Shannon Airport, following an announcement by the airline of a loss of €93 million for the first six months of the year.Aer Lingus chairman Colm Barrington said last week that if staff don’t “work at market conditions and market rates we won’t survive”.The company is due to announce a hard-hitting survival plan in the couple of months and, as well as pay cuts, it is speculated that there will be between 500 and 1,000 redundancies.

With a new slimmed-down Shannon Airport Authority due to take office on September 16, Dermot Walsh surveys the five-year tenure of the inaugural authority   THE Shannon Airport Authority got off to a controversial start and has seldom been very far from controversy since the break-up of the old Aer Rianta and its replacement by separate boards at the three State airports in 2004.Five years after that proclamation of “autonomy” by the late Seamus Brennan when he was Minister for Transport, Shannon has yet to see Government promises delivered. Shannon has an airport authority but no independence and, as the July report of the Government Task Force documented, is still under the thumb of the Dublin parent body. Neither has the pledge that Shannon would set out as a separate entity “debt-free” been honoured.