Category: News

THE face of Whitestrand beach in Miltown Malbay could be changed forever as the weekends storm ripped away a 50-year-old sea wall and washed large sections of the beach and nearby land into the sea.

According to local landowner Noel Shannon, the beach and surrounding areas have been left devastated after this once-in-a-hundred-year storm.

“It is absolute devastation up here at the moment. The sea wall has been washed away and caravans have been hit and damaged. Most of the sea front at the Whitestrand has been wash away and the rest is covered with rocks. I was just there this minute [Monday morning] and the place is a disaster,” he said.

“The biggest issue is the concrete sea wall, which has been just swept away. I’ve never seen anything like it. That was was holding the sea back; it’s been there for 40 or 50 years.

“There has been a lot of attention for other areas, and rightly so, but the Whitestrand is a very popular spot for young swimmers and for lifeguard training and it needs to be looked at and given some attention.”

Mr Shannon, who operated the nearby Whitestrand Caravan Park, and says that he has lost a considerable amount of the land to the storm – with massive waves simply washing sections of land into the sea.

“There is a lot of ground lost to the sea and there is an awful lot of work that needs to be to done to get the Whitestrand up and going for the tourism season. Parts of my land are no longer there anymore, they have washed into the sea,” he said.

“The council [Clare County Council] were out to us over the weekend but there is not a lot can be done until the storm blows over.”

THE most tragic event of this weekend storms took place in Lahinch where a brand new playground, built using money raised locally over more than a decade, was virtually washed away overnight.

The playground, which has been open for less than two years, sustained massive damage during the storm which ripped up all the protective matting, collapsed walls and the creation of a six-foot deep crater.

The playground was yesterday described as a “war zone” by local woman and member of the Lahinch Playground Committee, Nicola Hartigan-Downes.

“It is devastating. We invested so much time and effort into this playground and it was just wiped out in 24 hours. We’re back to the drawing board now.

“It is like a war zone. It’s like someone came in and dropped a crater right on top of it. There is a whole on the ground that you could fit a six-foot man into, all of the rubber mats have been lifted, fences and the gate have been knock. A lot of the equipment seems to be okay, we haven’t had an assessor out to it yet, but hopefully it will be okay. But we don’t know.

“The Clare County Council bottle banks were washed from one side of the playground right through to the other; we’re not sure what damage that might have done. It’s total devastation, the whole of the ground has been lifted off the playground.

“The playground is under water at the moment [Monday afternoon], so we don’t know what new damage has been done. All we can do is wait and see.”

The Lahinch Playground Committee held an emergency meeting last night and say they are determined to get the playground open again as soon as possible.

“We are moving on this straight away, we want the playground back up and running for the season. We had a lot of positive feedback from local businesses people and residents to say that they are behind us 100 per cent and they will be there with funding and manpower to help us out,” continued Nicola.

“We’re meeting tonight [Monday night], to see what the next step will be and we will we working on this straight away after that.”

MORE than € 100,000 worth of damage has been inflicted on Lahinch Seaworld which will remain closed to the public until further notice. The facility was hit with a severe flood on Friday morning as flood waters from Lahinch Golf Club and the Liscannor Road Car Park, overflowed into its control room – severely damaging both the structure of the building and the swimming pools facilities.

Manager of Lahinch Seaworld, Joe Garrihy, said that his team are work ing hard to get the facility up and running as soon as possible.

“We have extensive damage to our plant room, to the boiler house, to the cinema and the multi purpose hall. The big systems in the plant room and the boiler house, like the heating system for the pool, had been submerged in about three foot of water. So that is a big problem,” said Mr Garrihy.

“The flood actually came from the Golf Club side. There was so much flooding in that area that it eventually flooded down to ourselves. So we had it coming at us from both directions.

The damage comes at the worst possible time for Seaworld, as this is their busiest time to secure new members for the gym and pool.

“We need to reopen again as soon as possible. This is the busiest part of the year for people in the fitness sector, so it is a big blow. We are going to be closed until next Monday [January 13] at least,” continued Joe.

“Once the heating is off it can take as much as much as a week to get the water to heat up again and to get the water filtered properly. We are targeting that week at the moment but we can’t say for sure.

“We need to be back up and running soon. We service around 30 school in the North Clare area and they need somewhere to swim. Membership is our core business, and if they don’t have somewhere to go they will either go somewhere else or give up on out new years resolution.

“We are all really determined to get this back on track. We have had a great response from the public – local people and people from all over the country. Everyone is really determined to get this back on track and I’d like to thank everyone from all their support.”

THE Lahinch Promenade will be reopened to the public later this week with repair crews from Clare County Council set to begin work on the battered site this morning, January 7.

The promenade felt the brunt of this weekend’s unprecedented storms with millions of euro worth of damage being inflicted in just 48 hours. A combination of storm tides surging underneath the promenade itself and 40-foot waves crashing over it inflicted major damage to the sea wall and the structure of the prom itself.

Dozen of concrete slabs were lifted off the prom wall while large sections of iron railing, installed earlier this year by Clare County Council, were snapped and washed away. Despite the extensive damage, Clare County Council expect to be able to reopen the promenade before the weekend.

“The storm themselves are only beginning to die down at this stage as it is impossible to do any meaningful work in storm conditions. So, over the next few days we want to get in there and carry out the basic re- medial works that need attention and get the prom opened again as soon as possible. We would hope to be in a position to open the prom in a matter of days, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. To bring it back to the type of facility that it deserves to be will take major works,” said senior engineer with Clare County Council, Tom Tiernan.

“We have to put some sort of an estimate on what this is going to cost and make sure that this estimate is heard and considered and that we get the finding that we desperately need to carry out this work.”

The council has also committed to having Lahinch ship shape again before the start of the tourist season.

“The council are determined that Lahinch be up and running fully for the summer season. Nobody needs to be reminded that Lahinch is one of the jewels in the crown of Clare tourism and it needs to be up and running again for the summer season. The prom is one of the icon parts of the Clare tourism product and we want to be in a position where by that product is as good as ever come this summer,” continued Mr Tiernan.

A MOTHER has spoken of the terror felt by her family when their home was the target of a suspected gun attack in Ennis last week.

Shots were fired at a family home in the Cloughleigh area of the town in the early hours of New Year’s morning. No one was injured in the attack but windows and the front door of the house were damaged.

A husband and wife and seven children including a one-year-old girl were in the house at the time. A 46-year-old man was questioned and subsequently released without charge.

Gardaí in Ennis yesterday issued a renewed appeal for information.

They are interested in a grey saloon type car that was seen leaving the area at the time with two occupants on board. A garda spokesman said that investigations into the matter are ongoing. A large downstairs window and door remained boarded over at the house yesterday.

In her sitting room, the mother of eight, who was present in the house on the night, relived the horror of the attack.

The couple were upstairs watching television having just returned from a New Year’s Eve party when they heard the sound of windows breaking, according to the woman.

“We looked out and saw three men well known to us driving a silver private car. We shouted down at them,” she said.

The woman, who did not want her name to be published, said shots were then fired at the front door and at the upstairs bedroom window where her husband was standing while “rocks came through the sitting room win- dow”.

The couple’s daughters (ages eight, three and 16) and one-year-old grandchild were asleep upstairs at the time. Their three sons were asleep in a downstairs bedroom.

“We were terrified but the kids were probably more terrified,” the woman said.

The incident may be linked to a recent court case in Ennis, which the family had no direct involvement in.

The woman says the family’s car has previously been damaged while she says her son was the victim of a serious assault in Ennis last June.

She said, “We feel like our lives have been taken away from us. We are afraid for our children.

“We know nothing about any feuding that’d be going on in this town. We have nothing to do with anything like that. My husband has never been in trouble in his life. All we want is justice for this.”

Members of Ennis Town Council will meet in private today to discuss the incident in Cloughleigh.

Independent councillor Paul O’Shea yesterday warned that lives will be lost if violent incidents in Ennis do not stop.

BUSINESS people in Doolin are keen to ensure that damage inflicted on Doolin Pier over the weekend is addressed as soon as possibly. The pier, its access road and the car park took extensive damage on Thursday night, with much of the flood defenses also being destroyed.

This left the pier vulnerable to a second wave of flooding on Monday morning, which undid much of the repair work undertaken by locals and Clare County Council over the weekend.

Eugene Garrihy of the Doolin2Aran ferry company is keen to ensure that the damage to Doolin not be left on the long finger while repairs are carried out elsewhere.

“Lahinch is getting a lot of the attention and rightly so; there was incredible damage done there, but the situation in Doolin needs to be address also. It is a terminal port and many of the tourists there are international tourists,” he said.

“We need the ESB to bring electricity back to the area and we need the council to restore some sort of road service so we can access the pier and start to get things back to normal.”

The Doolin Pier was hit with a double whammy with the smaller Monday morning storm doing more damage that the Friday storm, because all the flood defenses had been washed away on Friday.

“The fact that a lot of defenses were broken down on Friday meant that this morning surge [Monday] did an awful lot of damage even though it wasn’t as big. A lot of boulders and debris at the ferry offices on the pier were moved again last night, but at least we had a bit more warning about it,” continued Eugene.

“The basic infrastructure of the pier – the road and walls – have all been disturbed so that will have to be reinstated as soon as possible. It was the water rather than the wind that did the damage in Doolin.

“We took it upon ourselves to get the clean-up started on Saturday. We had five or six men there with a machine and we got a lot of the infrastructure back in action. The council also sent up a JCB and started to clear the car park. Hopefully we have seen the worst of it and we can get back to the clean up work tomorrow [Tuesday, January 7].”

IT IS estimated that almost one third of Clare babies are delivered by caesarean section.

According to a Health Service Executive (HSE) survey of the country’s 19 maternity units, the c-section rate at Galway and Limerick maternity hospitals is almost twice that recommended by the World Health Organisation.

At the Regional (UCHG) Maternity Hospital Galway as many as 29.56 per cent of deliveries were by caesarean section in 2011, and 27.43 per cent of births at Limerick Maternity Hospital.

The WHO recommends that the nation birth rate by caesarean section should be no higher than 15 per cent. The highest caesarean birth rate was in St Luke’s Hospital, Kil- kenny, at 38 per cent, almost double of that in Sligo General Hospital at 19.3 per cent.

As well as showing a wide regional variation in caesarean section deliveries, the survey released under the Freedom of Information Act, also revealed that Limerick Maternity Hospital had the lowest breast-feeding rate in the country.

The 2011 figures show that 32.5 per cent of babies at the Limerick hospital were exclusively breast fed on discharge. Just 38.6 per cent were combined fed – bottle and breast.

In Galway the figure for mothers exclusively breast feeding on discharge was at 39.8 per cent, with the majority of mothers – 59 per cent – opting to combine feed their new borns.

Limerick hospital had a higher rate of non-instrumental deliveries in 2011 at 55.98 per cent compared to Galway at 52.92 per cent.

“A PIONEER of business, a visionary and a gentleman of the old style.”

These were just some of the quotes used this week to describe Michael Lynch Snr who passed away early on Monday morning aged 85. The Newhall native owned, built and operated the iconic West County Hotel for a number of decades and was known throughout Clare and beyond for his business acumen.

Affectionately known as ‘Mickey’ Lynch, he opened the West County Hotel back in the late sixties originally as a twenty bedroom hotel with a restaurant, bar and grill room. Then Minister from Clare Dr Paddy Hillery cut the ribbon on the original West County Hotel on March 15th 1968.

The first manager of The West County was John Madden, who moved from the Gresham Hotel in Dublin to take over the operation of Clare’s newest hotel. He recalls Mickey Lynch as wonderful to work for, a man of enthusiasm, vision and generosity:

“Mickey Lynch was a man of great ideas, a true visionary. He built and grew The West County. He did that with flair, enthusiasm and he was wonderful to work for,” recalled John this week.

“He never went away anywhere without coming back with new ideas for The West County. Mickey really was ahead of his time. Anytime we spoke about the need for additions, like the function room or more bedrooms, something that might attract tour operators, Mickey would get straight to work and deliver whatever was necessary to grow the business.

“The function room was a perfect example. Once he was convinced of the need for it, it went up in no time. Before we knew it we had over a thousand people coming to our hotel weekly for functions, dress dances, dinners and shows. People came from all over Munster to attend events in the West, Mickey was the instigator of all that,” remembers John.

Mickey Lynch was also remembered this week as a proud Clareman, good to his community and generous to a fault. As John Madden pointed out, he was very supportive of his native county and its people.

“If a local organisation was in need, Mickey was first in line to give. He was generous with both his time and his money. He was also very good to his employees. And I suppose one of the qualities I most remember was Mickey’s ability to have a good dis- cussion, disagreement even, then five minutes later we moved on, it was forgotten about. I learnt a lot from Mickey Lynch,” John told The Clare People. Mickey Lynch originally was a builder and set up Lynch’s Joinery across the road from where the West County is now situated. Michael Lynch Limited is now fifty seven years in business and over that time has employed many hundreds of Clare people from all over the county in the various family enterprises.

One of Mickey Lynch’s oldest friends Pakie Tuohy from Tiermaclane in Ballyea remembered Mickey Lynch this week as a business man with the common touch:

“Mickey was a gentleman of the old style. He was a very visible presence in the West County and a wonderful host. Always generous, Mickey was great company, he knew everyone and everyone knew him. It was always ‘hail fellow, well met’ with Mickey,” Pakie recalled this week, going on to emphasise the impact the newly opened West County had on Ennis in the late sixties, seventies and eighties.

“It should be remembered Mickey really brought entertainment back to Ennis with The West County. From dinner dances to music in the bar on Saturday nights, the hotel very quickly became a focal point for gatherings. Always a well run establishment, we had many great nights there and Mickey was on hand for all of them. He really was ahead of his time,” Pakie fondly remembered.

Michael Lynch is survived by his wife Chrissie, sons Seamus and Michael Jnr, daughters Geraldine, Colette, Martina, Annette, sons and daughters in-law and a host of grandchildren. He will be reposing at the family home on the Clare Road, Ennis, on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the house private on Thursday morning. Funeral Mass for Michael Lynch will take place on Thursday at 1pm at the Cathedral in Ennis, following by burial in Drumcliffe.

THE number of people using the Western Rail Corridor which connects Ennis to both Limerick and Galway continues to drop.

Despite a number of initiatives designed to increase passenger numbers on the route, new figures show that fewer than 200,000 people used the route in the first 11 months of 2013.

Figures for the route, which was reopened at a cost € 106 million in 2010, show that only 197,780 line passenger journeys took place on the line between the beginning of January 2013 and December 1. This compares with almost 250,000 over the same period in 2012.

It is hoped that the introduction of online booking on the rail service will provide a significant boost to passengers in 2014. Nearly two years after the issue of online booking was first raised with the Iarnrod Eireann, online booking was introduce on the line last month.

Passenger numbers on the route have been growing on commuter routes such as Ennis/Limerick and Athenry/Galway in recent years and it is hoped that online booking may also help to promote business from Ennis, Sixmilebridge and Gort.

“We know this is something which our customers and the wider community have been anxious to see provided for some time,” said a spokesperson from Iarnród Éireann.

“Our fares from € 5.99 each way for adults and € 2.99 each way for children are extremely competitive, giving big savings to families at a time of year when every cent counts.”

TODAY (Tuesday) is the fifth day that six families remain isolated from the rest of the county, as part of the Loop Head Peninsula has been rendered an island.

The storm on Friday morning saw the small rural area of Kilcredaun segregated from the rest of West Clare as water gushed in from Rhinevilla. An estimated 300 acres of land is currently under seawater.

The area famed for its lighthouse and Irish school could remain dis- connected for some time with the people marooned on the “island” still unsure as to when the waters will recede enough to let them access the rest of the county.

Pat Gavin, the postmaster in Carrigaholt Post Office, is one of the people unable to leave the area and as a result the local post office must remain closed.

“God knows when we will get off here,” he told The Clare People .

The West Clare man had been able to get to the village of Carrigaholt for a brief while on Friday with the assistance of a neighbour with a trac- tor.

Sunday night and Monday’s waves however have now washed away that road and any access to the six families.

“We are an island surrounded by the sea,” said Mr Gavin.

“We are left cut off. You can imagine no fuel, no food. Except my neighbour coming up on Friday to bring me out of here for half a day to open the post office [we could not have left]. We are a good community. The post office was flooded on Friday and all the community turned up to clean it. We’ll come back bigger and better than ever,” he said.

However while Mr Gavin is marooned on the island with his neighbours, the post office in Carrigaholt flooded again yesterday morning (Monday).

“I don’t know what we will do when we get out, I am not sure what state it will be in.”

He explained that the homes still have electricity and he feels lucky that his freezer has food for now.

He in angered however that political promises made by the present Government to carry out work along the peninsula were not carried out.