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MEMBERS of the Fine Gael party in Clare are to tell the Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan that a carrot rather and stick will reap more rewards in the county when it comes to collecting the household charge.

The loss of almost a quarter of a million euro of council funding last month will not be returned to Clare County Council, despite reassurances from the Minister through the two local Fine Gael TDs that all funding would be paid if a certain threshold was met.

On Saturday, Fine Gael councillors and Oireachtais members met and discussed the announcement following Friday’s developments.

It was agreed that there was little incentive left for the collection of the charge if the council and its public services were to be penalised regardless.

In a statement after the meeting the party in Clare said’

“There is a € 1.5 million shortfall in the household charge collection in Clare from 15,000 households who have failed to pay the legally due charge brought about by the collapse of the economy.”

It said the issue of the refunding of the € 240,000 from the third quarter payments from Government was discussed on the agenda.

“There is a Clare Fine Gael proposal being put by the Oireachtas members to the Minister for his urgent consideration to enable the refund that € 240,000.

“The proposal seeks the refund if a significant further improvement of payment rate is achieved in Clare over the next number of weeks.

“Essential council services need to be funded and unless we all contribute and pay we will fail to improve our collection rate,” it stated.

As the Fine Gael members prepare to meet with the Minister for Environment Phil Hogan on Saturday next at a party fundraising dinner, many admit privately that he has lost credibility with them.

This means any reassurances they might receive will be coated in more salt than the € 100 a plate dinner.

SERVICES will be cut in the county to cover the € 240,000 withdrawn from the council coffers by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government.

Last August, council members agreed to continue with services as planned under the budget adopted at the beginning of the year, on re- assurances from the county’s Fine Gael Oireachtais members that the money cut from the third quarter of the budget would be returned.

Now the council must take an axe to services during the last three months of the year to make up the unplanned shortfall.

The county’s councillors were angered on Friday when it was announced that the money would not be returned as promised.

Instead it must face a meeting on Monday where it will be asked to consider cutting certain vital services in order to balance the books.

Former mayor of Clare Tommy Brennan (Ind) proposed last August to go ahead with the budget as planned given the reassurance from the Government members present, and this week he was angry at the u-turn.

“I am calling on them [TDs] to see the Minister and return the money to Clare County Council. A lot of services will be cut back otherwise,” he said.

Mayor of Clare Pat Daly (FF) described the minister’s decision as “totally wrong”.

“The council is living on the edge at the moment.

“The last thing we need to do it cut services and there is a real danger that this could happen.”

He added that there was a real danger that those that did not pay will not pay the household charge now.

“Two thirds of people have paid the charge and they are being penalised by this man,” he added referring to the minister.

“He has let down his Fine Gael colleagues, especially Pat Breen and Joe Carey in a big way.”

Fine Gael councillor Joe Cooney was equally incensed by the decision.

Describing it as “desperate” and “unbelievable”, he fears for the future of essential public services.

“My belief is that minor and local roads are going to suffer, and we are asking people on those roads to pay taxes and household charges,” the councillor added.

Cllr Joe Arkins (FG) said he was concerned that there was “now no incentive on Clare County Council, Clare county councillors or the householders of Clare to contribute to the charge.”

THE Government has reneged on a promise to return almost quarter of a million euro to the people of Clare if they increased their payment of the controversial household charge.

The fall out has placed the county’s two Fine Gael TDs in the eye of a storm as they delivered the message from Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan just over a month ago that the cut to the county council’s Local Government Fund was a temporary measure.

In his address to councillors last August, Deputy Pat Breen (FG) said the loss of € 243,000 from the third quarter of the funding allocation would be returned to the council’s coffers.

“You will get back what is owed to you before the need of the year. I don’t think the council should worry about that,” he said.

His colleague Deputy Joe Carey said, “The money is not being cut. It is being withheld.”

“We don’t have to face the cuts if we get the allocation up to 70 to 75 per cent. I got that assurance from Phil Hogan,” he added.

On Friday the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government confirmed the money would not be paid back to Clare County Council under any circumstances but as the county surpassed a 65 per cent payment rate it would not be further penalised during the last quarter of the year.

Deputy Carey told The Cla re People yesterday (Monday) that while the reduction is “disappointing” the overall allocation was € 10.8 million. “The reduction is two and a half per cent within the budget,” he said.

He added that reassurances given to the council by him and his colleagues was done in “good faith”.

“Notwithstanding that, at that meeting I said if Clare County Council got up to 75 per cent there would be a reimbursement, it is still only in the high 60s,” he said.

Since then he said the budgetary situation had changed.

Deputy Breen said he was disappointed, frustrated and angry.

“I am disappointed with the fact he assured us funding would be there and then I got informed that the department cannot deliver on promise,” he said.

He added that he “always tells the truth” and the information was given in “good faith”.

“The return of the household charge is not as good as it should be,” he added which impacted on the loss of the funding.

Asked if his relationship with Minister Hogan was now strained, he said he had a good relationship with all ministers and this was not a personal decision by the minister.

He added however, “I am going to have strong words with Minister Hogan.”

ONE in every eight second-hand cars in Clare have been clocked and reads significantly less mileage than they have actually travelled.

This means that almost 6,000 Clare motorists are driving vehicles which are worth much less than they think – and could also be close to a dangerous equipment failure.

According to figures compiled by Cartell.ie, 5,357 Clare cars have had their mileage tampered with. It is not illegal for a person to change the mileage on their own car – which means that the equipment to tamper with odometers is easily available within the industry.

It is illegal to sell a vehicle under false pretenses however, but it is difficult to assertain the true mileage of a vehicle without carrying out a full diagnostic on the vehicles engine.

The figures were obtained by calculating the number of Clare drivers who discovered a mileage discrepancy in their vehicle when the checked against official records on the Cartell.ie website.

“I think the number of cars that have been clocked in Clare would shock a lot of people, but you have to remember that it is not illegal to clock a car in Ireland. If it is a private sale, there is very little danger for a person who wants to clock their car and sell it on to someone else,” said John Byrne of Cartell.ie. “The equipment is easily available and it is a lot more prominent that people realise. Some people don’t see the problem with it, it has become the accepted standard in a lot of places and they don’t see it as being an issue.

“Clocking in itself is not illegal. But it is illegal to sell a car as one thing, when it really is something else. But that is very difficult to catch. The National Consumer Agency manages to prosecute approximately one person a year, which is a drop in the ocean.”

Cars which have been clocked are potentially dangerous to the driver.

“There is a safety element in all of this. You could be driving along the motorway and all of a sudden you have a drive failure on your car. That is a dangerous situation to be in and it is something that you won’t expect if your car has 100,000 more kilometres on the car than you think,” continued John. A win t ry fe e l t o t h e we e k, d u ll, win d y a n d we t a t t im e s, b u t we sh o u ld e sc a p e t h e b ru n t o f t h e lo w o ve r t h e c o u n t ry.

ANTI-HOUSEHOLD tax campaigners in Clare are claiming a victory today after Clare County Council decided to stop asking grant applicants for proof of payment of the house- hold charge. This is despite Clare County Council’s insistence that the letters were discontinued because they had worked – and allowed the local authority to reach the 65 per cent compliance rate demanded by the Department of the Environment.

“At the beginning of the week, Clare County Council implicitly threatened to withhold or delay student grants to those boycotting the unjust household tax, but following a protest by the Clare CAHWT, we have secured in writing a commitment from the council that they will not discriminate in any way against such students,” said Paul Whitmore of the Clare Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes.

“We marched into the council offices to demand a clear written promise from them that they would not in anyway discriminate against non-payers, and would stop sending these threatening forms to grant applicants.

“As a sign of the huge impact of people power, we have now received these guarantees in writing. This is a huge victory for our campaign. Hopefully in the future, the council will think twice before attempting such scare tactics.”

Students form NUI, Galway, GMIT, UL and LIT also staged a protest again the warning letters at the of fices of Clare County Council last week.

“The decision of Clare County Council is short-sighted and ridiculous,” NUI, Galway Student Union president Paul Curley last week.

“Students don’t own houses and linking the payment of the Household Charge to their grants is a cheap shot. We call on Clare County Council to abandon this badly thought out plan and process students’ grant applications as a priority.”

CARRIGAHOLT has been waiting 40 years for a public sewerage scheme, but the withdrawal of Government funding for the project means the picturesque village now has an indefinite wait for this essen tial service.

The € 1.5 million allocated to the project in 2008, jointly with Labasheeda, has been rescinded, despite promises that the money was ringfenced for the work.

Carrigaholt postmaster Pat Gavin described the wait as a disgrace.

“We have no bus service, no roads, no sewerage system and they want us to pay € 100 – for what?” he asked.

“Carrigaholt is at a standstill and there can be no further development until we get a sewerage scheme,” he said.

Carrigaholt and Labasheeda joint sewerage scheme was on the 20062008 Water Services Investment Programme (WSIP). A considerable amount of design work was carried out on it by Clare County Council up to and including 2009.

The local authority re-submitted it to the department of the environment as part of the 2009 ‘Assessment of Needs’ which fed into preparation of the 2010-2012 (now re-designated as 2010-2013) WSIP.

The Department did not include the project on the list for 2010-2012 however, despite allocating funding as far back as 2008.

“In our submission to the DECLG (Department of the Environment) for the 2011 Annual Review of the WSIP, we re-submitted the Carrigaholt element alone, on the basis that there are designated shellfish waters off Carrigaholt and that the DECLG had prepared a Shellfish Water Pollution Reduction Plan which in the council’s opinion warranted re-inclusion of the scheme as a pollution reduction measure.

“However the DECLG didn’t accept our submission,” explained Sean Ward, senior engineer with Clare County Council.

He added that it was impossible to say when the scheme would be back on the Department’s books again.

Meanwhile, the people of Carrigaholt remain in the same development limbo it has been constrained by for the last 40 years.

BIGGER houses and more houses in Clare than every before, with fewer and fewer people living in them.

This is the latest picture painted by the 2011 National Census of Population returns, which was revealed in the fifth bulletin report released by the Central Statistics Office in the past week.

Figures for the county that fewer people per household than ever before.

In 2011 when the census was compiled, the average number of people per household in urban areas was 2.61, a figure that increased slightly to 2.78 in rural areas, while the over- all figure for the county stood at 2.71.

These figures reflect the continuing overall trend of fewer people living in houses – a phenomenon that is explained by the building boom during the Celtic Tiger years being at a much faster pace than the population increases in the same period.

Earlier this month it was revealed that there were over 24,000 houses constructed in the county in the last 20 years, while in the same two-decade period the population of Clare only increased by 15,000.

There was a 76 per cent increase in the number of houses in the county between 1991 and 2011, from 31,606 to 55,616, but in the same period the average size of households in the county continued to drop.

The drop in the number of people per household in the county over the last 65 years is contained in the census returns.

The average size per household was 4.14 in 1946 as compared with 2.71 today, a slide that has continued in the 12 census reports compiled in that 65 years.

By 1966 the average size of households in Clare had dropped to 3.84, while it went under 3 for the first time in 2002 census when the average was down to 2.92.

The 2011 figures also show that for the first time in 20 years the average household in bigger in rural Clare than it is in urban areas of population.

ENNIS bid farewell on Saturday to one of the town’s best-known fishermen and nature guides.

Jimmy Allard, who lived in Beechpark, passed away suddenly last week. He was a three-time All-Ireland flyfishing champion and international Gold winner and a former member of the Munster Team Championship winning team. In 1976, he finished third in the World Championships.

His exploits were the subject of BBC and RTE documentaries. After working in England, Jimmy returned to Ireland in the sixties and got a job driving for Roadstone.

He lived for a time in Newmarketon-Fergus before settling in Ennis.

Mr Allard captained his country in the home internationals, beating Scotland in 1990 in Lough Owel, just outside Mullingar.

He was the first person to introduce ducks and geese to the River Fergus in 1990 and served as chairman of the Clare Regional Game Council.

In 2011, Mr Allard advocated converting a stretch of land between Beechpark and the One Mile Inn into a wildlife sanctuary. He also brought tourists fishing on lakes around Clare, the American actress Connie Francis and the former Governor of California, Ed Brown, being among Mr Allard’s more famous guests.

In an interview with The Clare People in 2007, Mr Allard recalled his love of fishing and the great outdoors.

“I got into the flyfishing back to Ennis in the ‘60s. I had an idea about starting up a club. I used to go down to Stonehall – there was an old man from England I used to know. He showed me how to make casts and flies.

“I started entering competitions here in Ennis. I did pretty well, won the odd competition and got a few prizes. I went to the Munster championships and I qualified for the National and the first time I was in that in 1974, I won it. It was the first time anyone from Clare won it. I made the Irish team after that. I won a couple of the big competitions on the Corrib,” he said.

Mr Allard will be sadly missed by his wife Cauch, children Tyrone, Kevin, Seamus, George and Cait extended family and friends.

THE Merriman Hotel in Kinvara is going on auction again this week, with the guide price set at just € 400,000, or € 12, 500 per bedroom.

The 32-bedroom hotel, located in the very centre of Kinvara, was auctioned already this year but that deal was not brought to completion.

On that occasion, the hotel was sold to the highest bidder for a price of € 610,000 and it remains unclear whether it will reach those heights again.

Along with the 32 bedrooms, the hotel also boasts a bar with the capacity to seat 200 guests, a dining room with licence capacity for 100, a kitchen, study, entrance hall and private secure car parking.

During the property boom, a number of luxury six-bedroom houses in Kinvara sold for more than € 1 million, or roughly € 170,000 per bedroom.

If the Merriman reaches its previous auction price of € 610,000 from earlier this year, it will be sold for just over € 19,000 per bedroom.

The auction will take place on Friday, September 28 at 3pm at the Victoria Hotel in Galway unless it is previously sold.

The property is being brought to auction by O’Donnellan and Joyce Auctioneers.

Meanwhile, property prices continue to fall across Clare, according to the Myhome.ie price change index.

Of the 48 houses whose asking price changed in the county so far this September, 46 reported a reduction in the asking price.

The largest drop in asking price was for a large thatched property in Doolin whose asking price fell by € 150,000, from € 500,000 to € 350,000.

AN elderly woman is recovering today after a fall at Doolin Pier on Saturday in which she sustained hip and head injuries. The woman slipped and fell at the water’s edge but she was brought to safety before she entered the water.

The Doolin Unit of the Irish Coastguard was alerted to the incident by one of the local ferry operators and were on the scene within minutes. The woman was given medical attention at the water’s edge before she was moved to a more secure location by stretcher.

The casualty complained of severe pain to her left hip and had a cut and swelling to her forehead. The woman was brought to Limerick Regional Hospital for further treatment.

Meanwhile, rescue services on Lough Derg took part in 25 different rescue operations on the lake this summer.

Figures released last week show that the Lough Derg RNLI launches nine times during the summer months, while the Killaloe Unit of the Irish Coastguard took part in 14 rescue operations since the beginning of June.

Among the call-outs responded to by the Lough Derg RNLI was a request to assist 15 people on-board a cruiser that had grounded by Cormorant Island, north of Illaunmore, some four nautical miles from Dromineer Bay.

The lifeboat also launched to investigate a vessel upturned in Youghal Bay, close to Garrykennedy, and on another occasion launched to assist four people after their cruiser grounded and they abandoned it to board a small tender.