Clare’s Loop Head celebrates Pride of Place victories

THE community of Loop Head in West Clare scooped a national award in the 2022 IPB Pride of Place Awards announced at a ceremony held at the Clayton Hotel in Dublin last weekend.

Scariff Community Council, Mountshannon Community Council, the Shannon in Bloom project and the Loop Head Together Project were nominated by the Rural Development Directorate of Clare County Council to participate in the annual competition.

The Loop Head Together Project was the overall winner of the “Coastal Community” category.

The project seeks to facilitate the communities of Loop Head Peninsula to come together in a spirit of resilience and integration to create a place ‘where everyone can thrive’. It includes nature monitoring and nature tourism development.

Loop Head also was named winner of the Climate Action Special Award for a regenerative farming experiment named Hemp4Soil, which explores the potential to improve soil quality and biodiversity while also creating alternative sustainable income streams for farms on Loop Head.

The project involves ten local farmers who, in conjunction with the Department for Agriculture, Fisheries and the Marine and local scientific and biodiversity experts, explore how growing hemp on the land could not only improve the overall quality of the soil and benefit local biodiversity, but could also provide sustainable income streams to the farmers in the future.

Scariff was named as runner-up under the “Population – 1000 to 2000” category in recognition of the vibrant local community activity in the town.

Many of the projects and initiatives have been spearheaded by Scariff Community Council, including the development of the Riverside Community Park and the local Community Tourist Office in Scariff.

Pat Dowling, Chief Executive of Clare County Council, commented, Clare’s success in the competition should be seen as a vote of confidence in this great work and I would hope that it will inspire the communities involved to achieve even greater things in the future.”

Hemp4soil Project leader, Laura Foley, described this award, and praise for the contribution made by three local teenagers for their bale hemp project, as a major boost for this initiative and the whole community.

It is also a fillip for Clare County Council’s decision to earmark the Loop Head Peninsula as a decarbonising zone for the county.

Ms Foley would love to see this pilot project extended over the coming years to reap even more benefits from farmers and the Loop Head Peninsula.

She recalled farmers added biochar to the soil and noted hemp can be turned into biochar, which is great for sequestering carbon and securing carbon credits.

A number of University of Limerick students have harvested some of the hemp and took it away to do project work and made products for use in the building industry.

She said they were considering growing more than ten acres in a new location, which would be more commercially viable to harvest.

Eight farmers in the Loop Head Peninsula have been netted in the first multiple-licensed, Government supported, project of its kind in Europe, to explore the use of hemp as a regenerative farming crop.

Hemp4Soil examines in detail the many potential benefits for the environment, the land and the farmer.

It aims to use regenerative farming techniques to improve life in the soil in three ways, soil remediation, microbial life and carbon storage.

The main objectives of the project are to reduce the presence of chemical fertilizers, improve soil microbial activity, increase carbon content of the soil, and provide training opportunities and knowledge transfer along with community dissemination.

It also wants to explore the creation of sustainable income streams for farmers, which may even pave the way towards the introduction of sustainable local industries in the future.

The participating farmers include Geoff Magee, Carrigaholt; Billy and Valerie Leonard, Moveen; Joe Bonfil, Kilbaha; Hugh Sheehy, Carrigaholt; Pat Liddane, Querrin, Sandra Bruce, Kilkee and Brid Ryan, Carrigaholt.