Tag Archives: Flan Garvey

AFTER five decades of reporting the news from Inagh, Flan Garvey has handed on the mantle of notes correspondent and is just beginning a well-earned retirement.  A retired school principal, Flan has been at the heart of local news and notes for almost 50 years. He was Inagh’s very first notes correspondent, after spotting a gap in The Clare Champion’s coverage in the early 1970s.  “I was a very young, enthusiastic teacher in the parish and joined the staff of Gortbofarna National School in 1965,” he outlined. “In 1973, I started at the national school Inagh and was there until I retired. I was an avid reader of The Champion and noticed that some areas had notes and details of local events. I approached Frank O’Dea, the editor at the time and Flan Galvin, the owner, with a view to starting the Inagh notes. They said, ‘Yes, by all means’ and it took off from there. I suppose I wanted …

THE significant contribution to Irish culture by the founder of the GAA will be celebrated next Sunday, with the inaugural Michael Cusack Day in Carron. A Shane Gilmore sculpture representing the central role of gaelic games in communities across the island of Ireland will be unveiled, exactly 173 years on from Cusack’s birth in Carron. A tree for each county will also be unveiled, along the Burren Fairy Trail and GAA Trail near the Michael Cusack Cottage, thanks to the support of the TOMAR Trust. Sunday’s event also will feature the launch of Going WeLL, a national wellness experience programme being developed nationally by the GAA to encourage people to take better care of their mental and physical health, and by so doing, to reconnect with their communities. Going WeLL is being rolled out on a pilot outreach basis to a range of communities, schools and FET (Further Education and Training) Centres from the Michael Cusack Centre this winter. It …

ON Wednesday next in The Falls Hotel, Ennistymon at 6pm, Flan Garvey, who served on Clare County Council from 1985 to 2009, will launch his self penned book, Inside Minds North and South. The book depicts his role in initiating the twinning of Clare County Council with Newry and Mourne District Council in 1988. Mr Garvey recalled a talk he gave to the twinning group in Ennistymon to mark the 21st anniversary. “I said imagine a man like me, a teacher, giving examples to others, sitting down watching television and being delighted when I saw that British soldiers had been killed. That’s kind of unforgivable and I thank God I got time to get forgiveness. “A great friend, Tom McLean said to me afterwards that he was thinking exactly the same from the opposite side. ‘We were both wrong, Flan’,” he said, and we shook hands. The retired school principal vividly recalls attending a July 12 Orange Order parade in …

A DISPUTED right of way on the proposed site for a new Aldi supermarket “will be contested to the end”, a former mayor of Clare told an oral hearing last week. An Bord Pleanála held a two-day hearing in Ennis last week after three separate appeals were lodged against permission for the development of the discount supermarket on the mart site in Ennistymon. As well as the amenity value of the existing mart, Kevin O’Connor, the resident living closest to the site, described how schoolchildren, local people and firefighters at the nearby station have used a stile beside his home to access a right of way through the mart grounds for decades. Mr O’Connor described how he is the third generation of his family to live on Churchill, his children are the fourth and his grandchildren the fifth. In cross-questioning, he estimated that the stile “must be there over 40 years”. He said he had been using it for the …