Gort

A YOUNG seal that was found in South Galway over four months ago is to return to Kinvara this weekend, where he will be released to the sea.

A SOUTH Galway school has come up with an innovative way of raising funds. Kilcolgan Educate Together is holding an auction of promises this Friday evening at Kilcolgan Castle.

An Tánaiste and Minister for Education Mary Coughlan will be in South Galway next week as an invited guest of local primary and secondary schools.

Galway East TD Ulick Burke has called for the Minister for Health to intervene and protect mental health funds in his constituency and across the county.

Kinvara is gearing up for The Spirit of Voice Festival, which returns to the seaside village from November 12 to 14 with concerts and events celebrating song, words, and the human voice.The festival launch was held at Johnston’s Hall  last weekend and featured performances by Aindrias De Staic and Tom Portman.Aindrias is an accomplished musician and actor, having won the best actor award at the Geelong Film Festival 2006 and The Galway Music Award 2007. He will be joined on stage by the musicians José and Estaban Moreno.Tom Portman is a gifted guitarist who specialises in playing the Dobro and lap steel guitar. His music ranges from blues to Indian ragas.The festival begins on Friday, November 12 at 8pm in Kelly’s with London hip-hop poet Kate Tempest and The Sound of Rum. Support on the night comes from the funky spoken word group Atlantis Collective and Galway’s The Lucky Crew.The following day, also in Kelly’s, Cork soul and funk group …

Last May, 88-year-old Robert Cresswell, a retired professor from the Sorbonne in Paris, donated his archive of photographs, slides and film footage of Kinvara to Ireland. A slide show of a selection of these images from the town from 1956-57 will be held in Johnston’s Hall, Kinvara this Friday night at 8.30pm. This will include the colour slides and film footage not yet shown in Kinvara.A comprehensive selection of the images is now also available on the Kinvara website (kinvara.com). The archive, which featured recently on RTÉ Nationwide, has also been taken on as a project by transition-year students from Gort Community School, whose task will include helping in identifying people in the photographs. Robert Cresswell lived for 15 months in Kinvara while conducting his anthropological studies during the mid-1950s. In 1969, based on his research, the Institut d’Ethnologie (Paris) published his book, Une communauté rurale de l’Irlande (A rural community in Ireland). His work is the only major anthropological …

A near ten-year campaign during which time over €300,000 was generated through voluntary means culminated on Saturday when the tape was cut to officially open the new extension, the Noone Building, to Gort Community School.Because the Noone Building focuses on the sporting and musical life of the school, on hand to complete the formalities were Galway hurling board chairman Joe Byrne from Kinvara, a son for former board of management chairperson, the late Toddie Byrne, and singer Sean Keane from Caherlistrane, whose two daughters are past pupils of the school and whose wife Virginia taught at the school until her untimely death earlier this year.The extension was called after the late Dr Francis Noone, a local doctor from Castletown, who generously bequeathed the sum of €100,000 to the board of management which part funded the new extension, which incorporates a music room, career guidance suite, oratory and dressing rooms.School principal, Denis Corry explained the background to the school development, which …

THE Coole Park Winter Programme is starting a little earlier than usual this year, with the first event taking place next Monday. The details of the 2010 programme, which is part of the Coole Park bi-annual series of cultural events, were revealed this week.The heritage course starts on Monday between 8pm and 10pm and will continue through all the Mondays in November. This year the course is entitled Reading and Understanding the Coole Landscape.Christy Cunniffe is the first speaker of the season. He will touch on the built heritage at Coole. Other speakers on the subsequent Mondays include Finola O’Kane Crimmins on 18th Century Designed Landscapes, Marie Boran on Estates and Landscape in East Galway from 1800-1900, Mark Greene on Reading the Landscape of Coole from Maps, Bridin Feeney on Digital Mapping and Biodiversity, Caitriona Carlin on Biodiversity at Coole, an NPWS representative on the management of the Coole Park Nature Reserve and Paul Naesen on the Landscape Archaeology of …