Regional

THE North-West Clare Family Resource Centre is calling on people and voluntary groups in the area to help shape its future.The centre, based in Ennistymon, is seeking submissions to help it prepare its new three-year plan.Since last year, the company is based in its new headquarters in An Grianán Resource Centre, Ardnaculla, Ennistymon.The FRC works in co-operation with voluntary groups and statutory agencies to address social inclusion, community development and family support issues in North-West Clare. It operates a number of national programmes, the main one being the Family and Community Services Resource Centre Programme. This is overseen by the Family Support Agency, which gives it core funding. It also operates community childcare, a counselling service and is a co-sponsor of community employment programmes.The contract with the Family Support Agency is based on three-year work plans and funding for the 2012 – 2014 period has been approved, subject to a new work plan being submitted shortly.Manager of the FRC, Gary …

Scariff Community College will open this Thursday under the new stewardship of principal Angela McNamara and deputy principal, Brian Crossan as the outgoing principal, Sean Daly, and deputy principal John O’Donovan, bade farewell this week.Ms McNamara is a East Clare woman and comes to the Scariff secondary school from Ennis Community College where she had been deputy principal. She is also a past pupil of Scariff Community College and according to Mr Daly she is looking forward to coming back to her alma mater. “She has been in to meet the teachers and they had a huge warm welcome for her. She comes with a very high reputation, as does Brian. There are very high hopes that they will carry on all the good work and develop it and make it even better,” he said. Meanwhile, Brian Crossan, who is originally from Longford but lives in Kinvara, comes to the post from the East Clare Adult and Community Education Centre …

Complaints made to Clare County Council and an East Clare county councillor over the felling of five trees in Mountshannon has been described as nothing more than “a storm in a teacup”. Mountshannon Community Council and Clare County Council had identified five trees along the main street of the village, which were deemed to be “dead” or “half dead” and on the certification of the local authority work was carried out to remove them. Following the works a number of residents complained to the county council and to their local county councillor, Pat Burke. He described the complaints received as a “storm in a teacup”. Councillor Burke explained that the trees had to be removed due to “health and safety” concerns as they had been rotten and stressed that the trees are being replaced. “Some of the residents sought permission to have these trees felled because the roots of the trees were undermining their foundations and five trees in total …

MINISTER for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan opened the refurbished Cultúrlann Sweeney library in Kilkee on Monday evening and a sizeable gathering attended the event.The €1.6m redevelopment of the 1950s public library building in Kilkee includes a revamped library with 12,500 books, DVDs, magazines and newspapers and a 108-seat theatre including a sound and lighting system and two green rooms.Minister Deenihan predicted the new facility will play an important public and social role within the town, while Helen Walsh, county librarian, acknowledged the public’s “patience and understanding during the redevelopment process”.Bernadette Kinsella, director of services, Clare County Council said the library needed to be upgraded to meet modern requirements.“The main reason behind the redevelopment of the previous building was that it did not sufficiently address modern accessibility requirements, nor did it possess efficient heating, advanced stage technology and the expanding functions of a modern community library,” she said.“The primary changes to the internal layout are the demolition of …

PATRICIA Dubois Zanini, the new Italian ambassador’s Belgian-born wife, her sister and the latter’s two children were in Kilrush on Wednesday morning to visit their ancestral Bulger and Scanlan family graves.The visit coincided with work being carried out under the leadership of Paul O’Brien and Kay Clancy in cleaning up the Kilrush Church of Ireland Graveyard.Patricia Zanini’s great-grandmother, Anne Bulger, was born in 1875 in Kilrush, where her father, Daniel Scanlan Bulger, ran a loan office and other businesses in Moore Street. The Bulger family moved from Moore Street to Dublin about a decade later. In 1896, in University Church in Dublin, Anne married Jules Tinchant, a Mexican whose family had a cigar business in Belgium, where they settled down.When Daniel Scanlan Bulger fell ill and died in Dublin in 1904, his wife, also Anne (née Delany), applied to be admitted a member of the Dublin Stock Exchange in his place but her request was turned down, apparently on account …

  John Torpey’s hurleys are in such demand they are shipped to the Irish across the world but last weekend a specially crafted Torpey hurley was presented to a novice at Croke Park. Xi Jinping, vice-president of the People’s Republic of China, received a traditional hurley-making demonstration by Belvoir’s Torpey and, having been presented with some hurleys, the vice-president gave it a lash on the Croke Park field. Speaking about the experience, the former O’Callaghan’s Mills hurler said it was “amazing”.“I have done workshops in the museum in Croke Park for all the All-Ireland semi-finals and finals for the last five years now and I have my own video in the museum in Croke Park with all my old tools. Alan Gallagher, stadium manager, rang me on Wednesday last to know would I be able to do a workshop for the Chinese vice-president,” he said. “It was amazing, we were all standing around and the photographers were there and RTÉ, …

Despite the recession, booking is brisk for this year’s Ennis Book Club Festival. Book club members and readers from all over the country will head to the town for the March 2-4 festival, which is the only one of its kind in the country.

THE flooding implications of constructing a new motorway, estimated to cost between €100 and €120 million, have prompted a local couple to condemn the proposal as “madness”.Pat and Caroline O’Brien, who live near the Clare campus of the University of Limerick, have highlighted the huge flooding risk by constructing Phase Two of the Limerick Northern Distributor Road from Knockalisheen to Annacotty for landowners and residents in the locality.The couple, who reside at Shravokee, Clonlara, are worried about the impact of building any structure across one of the principal flood plains of the River Shannon, already designated as a Special Area of Conservation.Commenting on areas where flooding has occurred, Clare County Council senior engineer Tom Tiernan recently explained the council has a responsibility to design in such a way that any flood risk that pertains to a particular area is not exacerbated as a result of the construction and this must be facilitated in the design approach.Regarding the suggestion that a …