Category: News

ENNIS has held onto its ‘Clean to European Norms’ status in the latest litter survey by Irish Business Against Litter, despite dropping 15 places to 31st, among 42 towns surveyed.

There were just five top ranking sites out of a total of ten surveyed in Ennis – combined with two seriously littered sites. This puts Ennis in the bottom third of the towns / cities surveyed. Ennis Rail and Bus Station was the only area in the survey deemed to be “littered”.

The railway station scored a grade C in An Taisce’s report. It states, “The station itself is well presented e.g. good paving / road surface / planter boxes etc, but unfortunately there were a couple of separate incidents of heavy levels of litter on the ground beside the telephone box and on the steps. It was mostly ‘fresh’ litter, indicating it was not a long-term problem.”

A spokesperson for An Taisce descrbied the results for Ennis as “disappointing”.

She continued, “The two seriously littered sites, Ennis Community College and Ennis Railway Station, put Ennis at the bottom of the ‘Clean to European Norms’ category. The litter situation at Ennis Community College was a more long-term issue than that at the railway station. The R469 Quin approach road had been a very poor site during previous IBAL Anti-Litter surveys. Things were much improved this time around and hopefully this upward trajectory can continue.”

The findings come a week ahead of the results of the annual Tidy Towns competition. The study, despite showing continuing improvement in the cleanliness of our cities and towns, revealed the environs of Dublin Air- port to be a litter blackspot.

76 per cent of the 42 towns and cities surveyed were deemed to be clean, a record percentage. Cavan was judged Ireland’s cleanest town, one of 18 to be rated ‘cleaner than European norms’. An Taisce inspectors praised it as “a town that clearly takes great pride in its environment”.

CIVIL disobedience is a civil right of people in Clare – that’s the banner being waved by one public representative in Clare this week who is embarking on a crusade to have the practice enshrined into the practices and procedures of a local authority.

Outspoken Shannon Town Council member Cathy McCafferty will launch her campaign at a monthly meeting of the council in Shannon Town Hall on Tuesday by way of a notice of motion that will be up for discussion and consideration by the nine-member authority.

Cllr McCafferty made the headlines earlier this year after publicly falling out with the Sinn Féin party she had represented on Shannon Town Council, being initially suspended from the party before then resigning her membership altogether.

The exact details of her fall-out with Sinn Féin, both locally and with the party hierarchy in Dublin, was never publicly disclosed as the both party and politician went their separate ways. In the wake of her resignation from the party, Sinn Féin demanded that she live up to the party pledge to resign her seat on Shannon Town Council. However, Cllr McCafferty stuck to her guns and declared herself an independent.

Now, the independent has come up with a maverick stand of calling on her eight fellow councillors, headed by Mayor Michael Fleming, to back her controversial motion. While it’s expected that her fellow councillors will support her call for “the right of every citizen of this Republic to engage in peaceful protest”, it’s unclear whether they will back her right that they also be allowed engage in “civil disobedience”.

Cllr McCafferty was unavailable for comment when contacted by The Clare People on Monday.

CLARE’S population may have risen to a 110-year high according to the findings from the 2011 census, but some towns and villages along the west coast now have a ghostly appearance to them.

This finding is contained in the latest bulletin report from the Central Statistics Office on the 2011 National Census of Population that has shown up Kilkee, Lahinch and Liscannor as being home to more vacant houses than anywhere else in the county.

All three centres are in the top ten of a national league table of vacant housing, the only county to have more than one town/village in this listing.

The figures released by the CSO last Thursday show that Liscannor has the highest number of vacant houses in the county, with 73 per cent of the premises in the village and wider parish unoccupied, making it joint second in the national list with Balitmore in Cork behind Mullaghmore in Sligo that has a vacancy rating of 78 per cent.

Kilkee is next on the Clare list with 71.5 per cent of vacant houses, with Lahinch just over a percentage point back on 70.4.

This means that three Clare centres have been held up as virtual ghost towns/villages for most of the year, with only time when most of the houses are occupied coming during the peak holiday period of July and August.

The large number of vacant houses in Kilkee and Lahinch can partly be attributed to the huge surge in holiday homes in both tourist centres for a decade from 1995 onwards, when developers availed of special tax incentives.

The tax breaks were contained in a seaside resorts scheme introduced by the then Rainbow coalition government that reigned from 1994 to ’97. Both Lahinch and Kilkee were among 15 towns/villages around the country included in the scheme devised by the Minister for Finance, Ruairi Quinn.

However, the building boom that occurred on the back of this special designation has now resulted in reducing both Kilkee and Lahinch to ghost towns for most of the year – the building boom pushed up the house prices, which has been held up as the largest contributory factor to population decline in the two tourist resorts.

Kilkee now has a population of 1,037, which is a drop of 21.5 per cent on the 2006 census, something that is expected to see the town lose its town council status in the upcoming reform of local government.

Together the high vacancy rates in Liscannor, Lahinch and Kilkee mean that Clare now ranks fifth out of 26 counties in terms of vacant holiday home statistics with 4,160 behind Donegal, Kerry, Cork and Wexford.

Liscannor’s status as having more unoccupied houses than any other village in the county comes against a backdrop of a rising population. Between the 2006 and 2011 censuses the population there grew by 32.6 per cent.

A map of the county produced by the CSO shows that vacancy rates in West and North Clare are now running at over 25 per cent. Only seven other counties have higher rates of vacant housing than in Clare, with Leitrim topping the league table with 30.4 per cent, while within Munster, Kerry on 26.5 per cent is the county with a higher rating than Clare.

Vacant Houses
Liscannor 73.1 per cent Kilkee 71.5 per cent Lahinch 70.4 per cent Mountshannon 59.2 per cent Bunratty 51.3 per cent Ballyvaughan 50 per cent Doonbeg 42.4 per cent Miltown Malbay 39.3 per cent Lisdoonvarna 37.9 percent

THE full extent of the building boom that was experienced in Clare during the Celtic Tiger years has been revealed in the latest bulletin report released by the Central Statistics Office on the 2011 census returns for the county.

Figures for Clare have shown that in the 20-year period from 1991 to 2011, there was a 76 per cent increase in the number of houses in the county from 31,606 to 55,616 – statistics that paint a picture of the biggest building boom in the county’s history over a period in which the population grew by over 15,000.

The 2011 figures show that housing stock in the county now sits at 55,616. Of this figure 42,534 of the houses are occupied, which means that there is a vacancy rate of 21.2 per cent in the county, which represents over one fifth of the county’s housing stock know lies vacant.

This figure can be directly attributed to the building boom that took place in the county, with the number of houses being build over a ten-year period from 1996 to 2006 illustrating the scale of the property industry in the county at the height of the building boom. In 1991 there were 31,606 houses in Clare when there was a vacancy rate of 14.6 per cent. The number of houses increased by less than 3,000 over the next five years until 1996, while the vacancy rate dropped to 12.8 per cent.

However, from 1996 onwards there was a massive increase in construction, with 7,124 new houses built over a five-year period, which had the knock-on effect of bumping vacancy rates up to 16.1 per cent.

This trend continued from 2001 to 2006 when 7,321 new houses were built as vacancy rates jumped to 20.1 per cent. Now there are 55,616 houses in the county, an increase of 24,010 when compared with 1991 figures, but the vacancy rates are now higher than they ever were at 21.2 per cent which translates into 11,782. The numbers of vacant houses is 5,936, while there are a further 1,236 flats unoccupied. The number of holiday homes in the county stands at 4,610.

The Census figures revealed that the number of new housing stock in Clare increased by 14 per cent in be- tween the 2006 and 2011 censuses, which means that Clare house builds ran ahead of the national average of 13.3 per cent.

These figures highlighting Clare’s building boom have been released in the same year that Clare planning was placed in the dock by the heritage watchdog, An Taisce, which published a report saying that Ennis was “an example of some of the most senseless zoning excesses of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ era”.

This damning indictment was delivered in an Taisce’s hard-hitting annual report, ‘State of the Nation – A Review of Ireland’s Planning System 2000-2011’.

Ennis and wider Clare was singled out for special mention in the 45-page report that turned the microscope on 32 planning authorities throughout the country.

Clare has been ranked 23rd out of the 32, the planning in Ennis coming in for special mention because of a range of decisions that were made during the 11-year timeframe covered by the report.

“Clare was the most over-zoned county in the State with 3,208 hectares allowing for an overall additional population of 273,000,” the report said, while noting that between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of all planning decisions in the county was for one-off housing in unzoned land.

In Ennis, An Taisce said that “almost 4, 500 acres of land was zoned for development, sufficient to increase the population of the town from 26,000 people to over 100,000.”

KILRUSH is the third largest town in Clare behind Ennis and Shannon but, in terms of the information super-highway, the West Clare capital has now been cast into the slow lane when it comes access to technology.

Ennis once enjoyed Information Age Town status, while a new highspeed broadband service is now be- ing rolled out in Shannon, but the 2011 National Census of Population has revealed that Kilrush ranks as the second-worst town in Ireland when it comes to internet access.

The census statistics have revealed that 45 per cent of households in Kilrush now have internet access, which places the once bustling business and market town second-worst only to Rathkeale in Limerick, which has 55 per cent no internet connection rating.

The release of these statistics outlining Kilrush’s lowly internet rating came on the same day that the Minister for Communications, Pat Rabbitte, announced details of a new National Broadband Plan to bring the internet to every citizen in the country by 2015.

In acknowledging that there is a problem with internet access outside major urban areas and that State in- tervention was necessary, Minister Rabbitte said the new € 300m plan has been put in place following detailed consultations with leading telecommunication companies.

The census returns for Clare show that 25,041 households in Clare have access to broadband internet services, which leaves a shortfall of 17,493 households that have no broadband.

And of these 17,493 households without broadband, it has been revealed by the CSO that 12, 313 of these have no form of internet access whatsoever, while 4,149 have low speed internet access.

Thes low figures for the county will heighten calls for Clare to be given a prominent place in the new National Broadband Plan and its stated policy of providing broadband speeds of at least 30 megabits to every citizen within three years.

CLARE County Council’s clampdown on one-off houses in the rural part of the county has been graphically illustrated with the latest publication of the findings from the 2011 National Census of Population.

According to the ‘Roof Over Our Heads’ report, the number of new roofs over the heads of people in rural Clare has plummeted sharply from previous censuses, with the 2011 population study showing that oneoff house builds have been halved between 2006 and 2011.

There were 2,784 houses built in Clare between 2006 and 2011, with the number of one-off houses being 861, which represented just 30.90 per cent. When compared against the last census, which gave a breakdown of house builds between 2001 and 2006, there was a drop of 860 in new oneoff houses constructed in the county.

This reduction is in keeping with the slide in one-off planning permissions and house constructions that was heralded in the 2006 census when the figure of 1,721 one-off houses meant that, for the first time since records began, there were less single houses built in the county than houses than were part of developments. Between 1991 and 2000, the number of one-off houses constructed represented 69.80 of all houses built in the period.

Kilbaha-based Jim Connolly, who is the founder of Rural Resettlement Ireland, has said that present planning policy that’s against wide-scale oneoff housing is “enforcing urbanisation on people with disastrous consequences for the country”.

Continuing, Mr Connolly, who contested the 2011 General Election as an independent and a founder member of the Irish Citizens Party, said “future generations will rightly curse the planning policies of the Celtic Tiger period” and that “social, economic and cultural life has suffered from people being refused planning permission to build family homes in the countryside”.

IN AN era of Kindles and iPads, online gaming and smartphones, children across the county still find fun and adventure in an old-fashioned book.

Libraries across Clare will celebrate that love of reading and aim to recruit even more bookworms during the Children’s Book Festival 2012.

Events are already being planned at all Clare library branches over the month of October. Up to 100 events are in the pipeline to spark the imagination of young readers from toddlers to teens.

In association with Children’s Books Ireland, everything from readings by popular authors to writing and illustration workshops, plus storytelling and competitions, will be part of the line-up, with countless opportunities to explore a wide array of books.

Headlining this year’s festival in Clare are Marita Conlon McKenna ( Children of the Fa mine trilogy), and literary superstar Derek Landy, who will be celebrating the publication of the latest title in his Skulduggery Pleasant series, Kingdom of the Wicked .

Other visiting authors will include Alan Early, whose first book, Ar thur Quinn a nd the World Ser pent , has enjoyed extensive media coverage. Alan Nolan will be there as well, with his graphic whodunnits for 10- to 14-yearolds including The Big Break Detectives Casebook, Death by Chocolate and Six Million Ways to Die .

Nicola Pierce will give four readings based on her novel, Spir it of the Tita nic , now in its fifth reprint since publication last year, while Michel Moylan’s ‘Irish History Live’ will present an interactive show to his audiences on the making of the ship, how it was powered, the class system on board, how the ship sank and more.

Also among the many other authors visiting is Tomi Reichental. His visit to deValera Library, Ennis, on Tuesday, October 2, is exclusively for Leaving Cert students. During his visit, he will speak about his book, I Was a Boy In Belsen , as well as recalling his harrowing boyhood memories.

Hands-on workshops facilitated by experienced artists are always popular and, this year, children can choose from percussion workshops to journal writing by Isabelle Gaborit or story creation workshops with Donough O’Malley.

Visual artist and co-founder of Dog and String Theatre, Sarah Fuller will also be on hand to guide children in making their very own animated film show based on characters they will create on paper.

NERO fiddled, while Rome burned.

It was this analogy that floated around Ennis Town Council on Monday as Fine Gael representative Johnny Flynn received unanimous cross-party backing for his demand that the process of giving Shannon Airport its full independence from the Dublin Airport Authority be ac- celerated.

This demand for swift action came against a backdrop of another alarming drop in Shannon figures, with the latest results confirming that commercial movements at the international airport have fallen for the first seven months of the year when compared to the same period in 2011.

This downward spiral started with a two per cent drop in movements in January and peaked in April when the figures showed nearly a ten per cent drop on the corresponding month from 2011.

The figures then remained relatively stable for May and June, as the returns posted for commercial movements only showed a 1.6 and 1.3 drop respectively, but the slide accelerated once more in July with a four per cent drop.

These trends are set to continue for the remainder of 2012, which will en- sure that returns at the year end will show nearly a 50 per cent reduction in commercial terminal movements from the peak of 2007 which represented the peak of Ryanair’s association with the airport.

Ryanair currently operates to 11 destinations in Britain and mainland Europe out of Shannon. This represents over a 300 per cent cut in operations out of Shannon from a high of over 50 flights in 2008.

The airline began reducing its Shannon-based aircraft in February 2009.

It was this slide in Shannon’s fortunes that prompted the Government to embark on a consultative process over the future of the airport that was co-ordinated by Booz and Company in 2011, ahead of the formal announcement in May that Shannon would be given its full independence from the DAA.

OFFICIALS from Ennis Town Council are to meet with family members to discuss the best way to honour the memory of the politician and writer Paddy Hogan.

A native of Ennis, Mr Hogan was a Labour TD and member of the Oireachtais from 1923 to 1967.

For the final 16 years of his tenure, he was appointed by Taoiseach Eamon DeValera as Ceann Comhairle.

A qualified barrister, Mr Hogan was actively involved in the trade union movement and wrote a play about Irish freedom and the ‘Galway Shawl’ ballad.

According to a letter written to Ennis Town Council, the Labour Party in Clare are planning to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the party with a memorial to Mr Hogan.

It had been proposed that the Kilmaley roundabout be renamed the ‘Paddy Hogan Roundabout’.

The Labour Party say that the family “are not enthusiastic” about renaming a roundabout in memory of Mr Hogan.

At yesterday’s meeting of Ennis Town Council, former Labour party member, Cllr Paul O’Shea proposed that the new inner relief road be renamed after Mr Hogan.

However, councillors suggested that the matter should be discussed further between the council executive, the Hogan family and the council’s place names committee.

Cllr Frankie Neylon (Ind) said Mr Hogan was a “proud members of the community in Ard Na Greine who are very proud of him”.

He added, “I’d prefer if the family sit down with the council and come up with a suitable memorial to Paddy Hogan.”

Cllr Neylon said Mr Hogan should be commemorated. Mayor of Ennis, Peter Considine (FF) said he and council officials would be happy to meet the Hogan family.

Cllr Tommy Brennan (Ind) said the council had moved away from the practice of naming roads and estates after individuals. He said a plaque might be a more suitable memorial.

Work on the inner relief road, which will link Station Road to the Clare Road, is expected to be complete by the end of the month.

According to the council, this relief road is intended to include the overlay of Station Road from Árd na Gréine to the school crossing in the works.

ENNIS could literally turn green next March as part of proposals put forward to celebrate St Patrick’s Day 2013.

Ennis Town Council is to investigate the possibility of dying the River Fergus green as part of the ‘Green the Town’ initiative.

The proposal was tabled by Cllr Mary Howard (FG) as part of a motion at yesterday’s council meeting.

Cllr Howard called for the council, in conjunction with local businesses and venues, to ‘Green the Town’ by illuminating buildings with green filters and lights and hanging hundreds of Irish flags.

Cllr Howard told the meeting that businesses are very keen on the idea.

She said that in a year when Ennis celebrates the 25th anniversary of its twinning arrangement with Phoenix, Arizona, the green plans would help capture attention and generate plenty of publicity for the town.

Mayor of Ennis, Cllr Peter Considine (FF) backed the motion. However Cllr Frankie Neylon (FG) questioned if the council could justify the cost of turning Ennis green when it has had to cut back on other vital services. Cllr Howard said there would be very little cost to the council, adding that green filters cost just € 12.

Cllr Paul O’Shea (Ind) suggested that councillors pay for the cost with their expenses.

In response to Cllr Howard’s motion, town clerk Leonard Cleary stated that the technical staff of the council will research the feasibility of the project.

He continued, “With regard to turning the River Fergus green, there are non-toxic dye products that are used for tracing water courses that could be used for this purpose. The river through the town is a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and consultation will be required with other agencies. The council are trying to ascertain the cost of these products as the quantities required would be larger than normally used for dye tracing. The council will respond once the information is received.”