North Clare

The annual Burren Law School took place in Ballyvaughan over the weekend with messages of reform very much to the fore.

THE need for extensive reform was the key message of a number of speakers at this year’s Burren Law School in Ballyvaughan.

THE implementation of a North Clare environmentally friendly farming scheme has resulted in a dramatic reduction of 655,000kgs of silage required for 20 farms over a five-and-a-half-year period.

THE children of Corofin National School this week got an insight into 175 years of education in the North Clare village.Celebrating the 50th anniversary celebrations of Scoil Mhuire Náisiúnta, the pupils travelled to its parent and grandparent schools tracking education in the area since 1835.On Tuesday, the pupils visited Richmond National School, the site of education in the village for five decades.“That school was established in 1835 and was called Richmond School. It was on the grounds of Richmond House. The house was set up as a Yeomanry barracks for soldiers in the 17th century. By the 1830s, it was the parish priest of Corofin that was living there and the priest who had Richmond School recognised was a man called Fr Donovan. Nine years later, the girls’ school in Corofin was recognised,” Scoil Mhuire principal Declan Kelleher explained.Among the most notable things the children discovered during their research was that teachers in Richmond School included Irish bard Hugh Mac …

Thousands of additional visitors are expected to descend on the Burren over the coming month as a landscape-led festival takes place.Burren in Bloom, a festival providing information on the area’s unique landscape, will be launched this Tuesday. This year’s programme includes more than 25 separate events aimed at locals and tourists alike.“This is the sixth year of the festival and we have now built a whole series of events around it so there is something new each week. The Burren Law School takes place over the first weekend. The second weekend has the Gregan’s Gourmet Garden Gathering, the third weekend is the Burren Marathon and last year we had nearly 1,000 people at that alone. Then, on the final weekend, we have a whole new festival this year called the Festival of the Valleys, which is a weekend of music, song, food and sporting events to celebrate Celtic and Mediterranean cultural fusion,” explained Mary Hawkes Green, one of the Burren …

A fourth-class pupil from North Clare this week won a prestigious national award recognising independent thinking.Ronan O’Connell, a pupil in Scoil Mhainchin, Ennistymon, was adjudicated the winner of the fourth to sixth class category of the National Junior Inventor competition run by the Patents Office.The winners of the annual competition were announced on Monday, World Intellectual Property Day. It attracted more than 2,000 entries but Ronan’s idea for a safety sensor for electric cookers was cited as the top in his age group.The sensor would be built into electric cooker rings and would automatically turn itself off if there was no saucepan on it for more than 50 seconds.Ronan’s teacher, Veronica Clancy, first spoke to the school’s third and fourth-class pupils about the competition in September.“The idea of the competition was thrown out in September. Ronan maintained his interest from then on and developed his idea before eventually entering before the Easter deadline. It was quite an achievement for Ronan. …

New Quay dairy farmers in North Clare scored a major success at the 2010 JFC Rural Innovation Awards Ceremony held in Cavan on April 12, when the area provided two of the 13 finalists in the prestigious all-Ireland competition, which attracted more than 60 entries.