Tag Archives: Athlone

CLARE Drama Festival stalwart Tom Hanley is among 15 actors and organisers chosen by RTÉ to feature in a special short film to celebrate Ireland’s vibrant amateur drama circuit. While May is, ordinarily, the month when the RTÉ All Ireland Drama Festival takes place in Athlone, the Dean Crowe Theatre will lie empty for a second year in a row due to pandemic restrictions. In existence since the early 1950s, the festival has been deferred to 2022. However, actors from a range of the regional festival locations, including Clare, have come together to mark what should have been the 69th RTÉ All Ireland Drama Festival. Mr Hanley is among those to lend their voices and faces to a 2-minute film entitled ‘Interval’, a piece written by Joseph Hoban. Produced by RTÉ’s Tracey Diamond, the film focuses on the enforced ‘interval’ the pandemic created in the lives of people nationally and globally. It is a reflection on lockdown and the restrictions that have …

The Clare Champion newspaper has for the first time received three nominations at the annual Local Ireland Media Awards. For the third successive year, Clare Champion journalist Peter O’Connell has been nominated for a Local Ireland Award. This year he is shortlisted for the second time in the Best Sports Story of the Year for an interview with Cooraclare’s Tom Morrissey. In the article Tom reflects on his life and times 25 years after he helped Clare win the 1992 Munster Senior Football Championship. Multi-award winning Clare Champion photographer John Kelly was also nominated this year for Photograph of the Year for an image taken of Meelick man Robin O’Connell. The Clare Champion has also been nominated in the Best Designed Newspaper of the Year category. The awards will be held on Thursday May 24 at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Athlone where the winners will be announced.  

Gardaí investigating the disappearance of Adrian Folan from Athlone have sealed off an area close to a quarry near the Cliffs of Moher Garda Crime Scene Investigators are carrying out an examination in the area. “We cannot confirm the discovery of a body at this stage of the investigation,” a statement from the garda press office said. Mr Folan, who was last seen in Athlone town on the night of July 3, at approximately 11.40pm, is approximately 5ft 7” in height, has brown/grey hair, blue eyes and is of stocky build. He was wearing a grey coloured t-shirt, brown knee length shorts and sandals when last seen. The man in his 40s was arrested in Galway this morning and is detained at Galway Garda station under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1984.