East Clare

AT the end of last year, St Joseph’s Secondary School, Tulla, raised €625 for the Ennis branch of the Samaritans. Enterprising students held a ‘Colours Day’ as part of a Wellness Week initiative. Student Council presidents Aoife Kelly and Adam O Neill lead the initiative.

A TEAM of young East Clare men are hoping to provide a ray of hope this Christmas for families and individuals affected by the stress of cancer and mental heath issues. Tomás Meade from Quin has joined forces with five friends, all former pupils of St Flannan’s College, to get the Light the Way light photo competition under way in aid of Milford Hospice and Pieta House. The return to Level 5 restrictions put paid to plans to hold a tractor and truck run and the lads are now urging tractor and truck lovers around the county to light up and send them photos of decorated vehicles of all kinds. “This year has been really tough for so many people and very hard for people anyone going through cancer treatment,” said Tomás, an Automotive Engineering student at Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT). “Mental health is another issue that affects the whole community and a lot of people have been suffering …

A SCARIFF-born scientist has taken a prestigious funding award, for the second time, and has described the funding grant as “a dream come true”. Dr Pauline Scanlan has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society-Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) University Research Fellowship, which recognises her outstanding early career achievements, competing alongside the best for her research on microbial activity in the human gut. Dr Scanlan, who went to Scariff National School and then Scarriff Community College, is a role model and ambassador for careers in STEM.  She currently participates in many educational and public engagement activities such as hosting transition year and other students in their labs, primary school visits (which happened virtually in 2020). Her public activities involve her giving career talks, acting as mentors, providing guidance to students for BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (BTYSE) projects but also through her day-to-day interactions with students, and other trainee researchers. She is a firm believer in the adage, ‘If you can’t …

Tuamgraney-born author Edna O’Brien celebrated her 90th birthday this week to huge plaudits from the global literary world. President Michael D Higgins described the novelist as one of the finest chroniclers of Irish life. Widely regarded as Ireland’s greatest living writer, Ms O’Brien marked her birthday with the delivery of the TS Eliot lecture on Eliot and James Joyce for The Abbey Theatre. The piece was recorded at the Irish Embassy in London and broadcast on Tuesday evening (December 15). Ms O’Brien’s debut novel The County Girls convulsed 1960s Ireland with its honest representation of female sexuality and small town communities. Despite the reaction, Ms O’Brien in an interview in 1970 with RTÉ expressed warm feelings fro the county. “I would not want to have come from anywhere else despite certain inconveniences which I haven’t omitted to remember,” she said. In more recent years, The Country Girls trilogy has taken its rightful place in the canon of 20th century Irish …

IMAGINE a typical rural shopkeeper in the Ireland of yesteryear. “I picture him wearing a brown shop coat with ballpoint pens in his top pocket,” says actor and journalist, Jim O’Brien of Ogonnelloe. “He lives over the shop, and the shop is his life.” Now imagine that his merchandise is of a very specialised variety. This shopkeeper’s trade is not in groceries or other domestic essentials. His customers come from far and wide to purchase accoutrements of every kind, from small nuclear weapons to solar-powered chainsaws. All of them are tailored to the client’s exact needs. The only thing that links them is the fact they are all ‘plot unblocking devices’. This is the kind of shop – or rather ‘emporium’ – that is at the heart of an award-winning radio play recently produced and aired on Scariff Bay Community Radio. Its writer Tara Sparling devised the fantastical plot in a post on her popular blog (Tarasparling.com) and was encouraged …

A MOUNTSHANNON man’s cutting-edge research into positive uses for waste plastics, has secured more than a quarter of a million euro in backing from the Welsh government. Dr Alvin Orbaek White, who works at Swansea University, has pioneered a technology that changes waste plastic into valuable compounds for the energy industries, reducing plastics pollution in the process. The research will be instrumental in addressing the global transition to more efficient, cleaner energy resources and providing a new life for waste plastics, keeping them out of land and sea. A past pupil of Waldorf Steiner School in Raheen and later, Scariff Community College, he credits his inspirational work with the passion instilled in him by a number of his former teachers. “I had some great teachers. At Scariff Community College, TJ O’Halloran was really passionate about Science, and Pat Sweeney instilled a love of Maths.” His college years were spent at NUI Galway where he undertook his Bachelor’s degree, before obtaining …

COMMUNITIES across Ireland are being encouraged to grow and save their own seed together in a major new programme being launched by Scariff-based, Irish Seed Savers Association. The Community Seed Guardians Programme is a training and mentoring programme for communities across the country to grow and save their own food seed. The programme was developed with funding received through Rethink Ireland’s Innovate Together programme, which was established in response to Covid-19 to build resilience in communities. With growing awareness of climate change and fear over the limitations in the food supply chain brought into focus by the pandemic, the Guardian Programme will work with established community gardening groups to reduce Ireland’s reliance on imported food and food seed. Training community growing groups to grow and save their own food seed will increase access to seed availability and create greater community engagement with the full food supply from seed to plate. “We are excited to be given this support by Rethink …

AN ANCIENT craft is undergoing a revival in Mountshannon. Artists and blacksmith Mark Wilson has created a video series to share the knowledge and lore. A series of short pieces, shared on his Facebook page, have been getting major traction, and in Mark’s own words have “literally gone bananas”. Entitled ‘Revival – Tricks and Trades for the New World,’ the series has touched, to-date, on topics including wood crafts, making gifts and the ‘heritage of hammers’. On Hallowe’en night, Mark went live on Facebook and – lit by candle light – discussed the traditions and folklore associated with the festival. “I had been travelling the length and breadth of Ireland working in schools and passing on craft techniques,” he explained. “I have quite a lot of knowledge at this stage and I wanted to pass it one. This was something I was working on well before lockdown, but now making videos has become incredibly trendy.” While the production values of …