Category: News

A SURVEY of the Clare tourism sector shows evidence of growing confidence in the industry.

Up to 300 people involved in tourism in Clare gathered at the Inn at Dromoland on Thursday night to participate in the annual Clare Tourism Forum Gala Networking Evening.

During the conference participants were informed of the findings of a survey, which found that 57 per cent of operators are confident that 2013 will bring an increase in tourism business for their attraction/business.

A quarter of those surveyed said that business levels would be similar to 2012. Meanwhile, the majority of those surveyed say they are more hopeful for a recovery in the Irish tourism sector this year than they were last year, while 87 per cent said they plan to either maintain or increase existing staffing levels during 2013.

Just 13 per cent of operators said they were planning to reduce staff numbers this year.

Maureen Cleary, Marketing Executive, Clare Tourism Forum explained that Clare tourism operators have responded well to the shift in visitor trends in recent years with a significant increase in the number of people holidaying at home.

“While not neglecting the potential offered to Clare tourism by the international visitor market, a huge amount of work is being carried out by operators, both individually and collectively, to market the County’s many wonderful attractions to the domestic market. There is growing confidence in the Clare tourism sector as evidenced by the results of a recent Clare Tourism Forum survey of more than 100 local tourism operators,” she added.

Donnagh Gregson, Chairperson of the Clare Tourism Forum stressed the continued need for tourism operators to work together to increase tourism business in the County.

“The local tourism sector continues to face challenges in an increasingly competitive and commercial marketplace. However, Clare tourism and hospitality operators are actively working together to capture and increase visitor numbers to the County.

“Networking events such as this help consolidate Clare’s growing status as a competitive and appealing destination to both domestic and international visitors alike,” she said.

“This event also helps to promote collaboration between our members and other agencies involved in the promotion of tourism at home and abroad.”

The purpose of the free businessto-business event was to provide tourism providers with the opportunity to showcase their respective operations to the wider County Clare tourism Industry.

CLARE newest singing super star will be the focus of an hour-long radio documentary which will be aired this Friday, April 26.

Over the last five years Ballyvaughan’s Naomi O’Connell has become one of the brightest young stars in world opera. Having recently graduated from the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, Naomi is currently starring in a production of Offenbach’s ‘La Périchole’ with the New York City Opera.

Naomi began her singing career at just 13 years of age when she joined the Lismorohaun Singers. While with the Lismorohaun she quickly became the prize student of Lisdoonvarna’s Archie Simpson, who continued to tutor her while she was in Ireland.

Naomi graduated from the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dublin, where she won a host of national and international singing competition under the guidance of Mary Brennan and then undertook a four-year post graduate course at the Juilliard School. After all of her practice, she finally made her Carnegie Hall debut last month. Her story will be told in the hour-long documentary ‘Witches, Bitches and Women in Britches’ which will be aired on RTE’s Lyric Fm this Friday at 7pm.

The documentary was produced by Doireann Ni Bhriain who visited Naomi’s home in the Burren to get a sense of her early influences and also travelled to New York to spend a few days with the singer as she prepared for her Carnegie Hall recital.

She also spoke with many of Naomi’s current mentors and admirers in New York including opera director Stephen Wadsworth, composer Christopher Berg and Steve Shaiman of Concert Artists Guild.

THE opening of a new cycling route in North Clare this Thursday is being heralded as the first step towards creating a new type of tourist product in Clare.

The cycle way, which connects Lahinch and Ennistymon, will be officially opened by Minister of State Alan Kelly (FG) on Thursday.

The two-mile route, which will be named in honour of former local businessman, Gilla Skerrett, will connect up with the 200-mile long Wild Atlantic Way route, which is currently being mapped out by Fáilte Ireland.

Local businessman and head of the Irish Hotel Federation Michael Vaughan believes that extending this new route to Ennis along the route of the West Clare railway could make Clare the cycling tourism capital of Ireland.

“This is a great addition to the tourist product in the area and will be much used. I think this could be the start of a cycleway or a greenway connecting Lahinch and Ennis,” he said.

“If you were to continue on the logical route along the route of the West Clare railway I think you could easily get enough interested parties to make it a really good tourism project.

“Clare County Council have gone a great job in getting this started and we now need to keep the ball rolling.

“The biggest tourism boost coming down the road in the West of Ireland is the Wild Atlantic Way.

“This passes right through Lahinch and if we had this greenway from Ennis that would be a brilliant way of making this area into a real tourist hub.

“This is the way that tourism is going. We have to give people more of a reason to stay in Clare and spend more time in the area.

“Walking and hiking is probably the biggest tourist activity in the country now, and we are not doing enough to capitalise on that in Clare.”

A bench and plaque has been erected on the route in memory of Gilla Skerrett, who operated a garage and work studio on the Lahinch Road in Ennistymon for more than 50 years.

NEIGHBOURHOODS and communities around Clare are being encouraged to report any suspicious activity in thei r areas in the bid to beat the burglars.

There has been a recent spi ke in burglaries in rural and urban parts of the county and Gardaí says scheme such as Neighbourhood Watch and Community Alert play an important role in helping to deter crime.

Supt Derek Smart of Ennis Garda Station said, “Anybody that sees anthing suspicious that they feel isn’t right, pick up the phone straight away and give us a call. No matter how trivial they think it is, let us look at it. Let us now and that can all be done in confidence.”

Supt Smar t said plans to roll out a community alert text system in Clare are cur rently being reviewed. “There is an issue there with ensuring that the cor rect information goes out on that system. It’s actually being reviewed on a trial basis in parts of the country. Any system like that, we’d be eager to adopt.”

Cll r Michael Guilfoyle (Ind) is the area co-ordinator for the Turnpike Neighbourhood Watch Scheme that has been in operation for 22 years. He said the scheme has been effective in curbing crime and giving residents greater security.

He added, “I would encourage all communities, given all the recent cutbacks there has been to Garda resources, to set up neighbourhood watch schemes. It gives people in an area more security and confidence that their homes are protected.”

Ray Cummins, Chai rman of the Glassan Residents Association, said the area has been relatively unaffected by break-ins. However he said that the resident’s committee has discussed setting up a Neighbourhood Watch Scheme.

He said, “The one area, from a security and safety point of view that people are concerned about, is the inability to get proper street light- ing put in place. We are waiting for Ennis Town Council to take over the estate but that hasn’t happened yet.”

Meanwhile, three people arrested by Gardaí as part of an ongoing investigation into a series of aggravated burglaries in West Clare were released without charge last week.

The arrests of two men and one woman came following Gardaí investigations into recent aggravated burglaries targeting elderly people with incidents repor ted in Kilmihil, Moyasta, Kilmaley, and Inagh.

The suspects – all in thei r 20s were questioned by Gardaí at Ennis and Kil rush stations before being released without charge.

CLARE TD Pat Breen (FG) has been accused of helping to rig parliamentary question time for the Minister for Health James Reilly’s (FG) – in order to flood the session with positive questions.

Deputy Breen used his allocated question, during Minister Reilly’s last questions time, to question the Minister for Health about cuts to waiting lists at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.

This followed a similar question from Clare Deputy, Joe Carey (FG), about the reduction in the number of patients on trolleys at Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Ennis.

Indeed, more than half of the 170 questions submitted to last month’s health session were queries about cuts to waiting lists or MRSA infection rates submitted by Fine Gael backbenchers.

These actions were described as a “cynical abuse” of the rules of the Dáil by Clare Fianna Fail TD, Tim my Dooley.

“The Government parties are engaging in a cynical abuse of the outdated parliamentary question process to prevent opposition parties from getting to the truth of the broken promises which were made prior to the election,” said Deputy Dooley

“The five government reps in Clare, three TDs and two senators, need to face up to the litany of uturns on property tax, PRSI increas- es and child benefit cuts amongst others.”

The Minister for Health hosts a parliamentary questions and answers session every five weeks. The number of questions submitted has increased greatly in recent months with 71 submitted in September, 86 in November, 112 in February and 170 last month.

In a statement, Deputy Breen claimed that he had a perfectly valid reason for submitting the question.

“The reason why I submitted a PQ [Parliamentary Question] in rela tion to waiting lists at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, was because the Small Hospital Framework will shortly be published by the Minister for Health, which may have some affect on the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Ennis and given that hospitals in the Louth area have already undergone a reconfiguration I was interested in ascertaining the impact that this reconfiguration had on the waiting lists in Louth,” he said.

HOPES that a new state of the art national school will be built in Sixmilebridge to cater for the population explosion in the catchment area over the past decade have soared this week thanks to the intervention of the Department of Education.

Nearly a year after St Fiannachta’s National School in Sixmilebridge was controversially was excluded from the Government’s five-year schools building programme, the Department of Education has performed a u-turn.

In a decision announced on Monday, the department has revealed that the new school project for Saint Finnachta’s will now be progressed through the architectural planning stage.

“It’s good progress,” said school principal Gareth Heagney in welcoming this latest development “and it means we are moving the project to the real business stage and we will be liaising with the business unit shortly to get the specific details.”

Last June on a visit to the school, Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn admitted that the facility, which now boasts ten pre-fabs to cater for the ever-growing numbers of students, “wasn’t fit for purpose”.

Sixmilebridge is one of the fastest growing towns in the county with the development of 22 new estates swelling the town’s population by 51.1 per cent over the past seven years.

This population explosion has been reflected in school enrolments – there are currently 421 pupils in the school, a figure that’s set to rise to over 550 in the next three years.

The existing school was built in 1934 and was extended in 1985, while one of the ten pre-fabs in use dates from 1976. In 2005 the school applied for a capital grant to re-development the current building.

Three years later the project went to the design team phase, but was then shelved because of the gathering economic crisis.

However, the school principal has expressed hope that this week’s announcement doesn’t represent anoth- er false dawn for St Fiannachta’s.

“We are thankful and relieved that the Department of Education has finally acknowledged that our school is a school of rapid growth and with that classification it means that we’re going to move along a lot quicker than we have done,” he said.

“This news might be greeted with a little bit of skepticism, given the cutbacks in capital expenditure and the knock-backs that this project has encountered down the years, but I genuinely think that we are on the right track,” he added.

CLARE children are almost twice as likely to be admitted into a psychiatric hospital as children born in the rest of Ireland. According to the State of the Nation’s Children report, published by the Department of Children last week, a total of 20 Clare children were placed in the care of a psychiatric hospital in 2011 – the most recent year on record.

This means that Clare’s rate of committal per 1,000 children is 65.2 – the second highest in Ireland after Tipperary. Clare’s committal rate is almost twice the national average, which stood at 37.9 children per 1,000 in 2011.

The counties with the highest rate of children being admitted to psychiatric hospitals were all located in rural areas. Each of the counties with the highest rate of children placed in the care of a psychiatric hospital have suffered a major downgrade of their primary hospital in recent years with Clare, Tipperary, Roscommon, Monaghan and Leitrim having the highest ratios.

According to the report, 435 young Irish people were admitted to psychiatric hospitals in 2011. The vast majority of these young people were under the age of 18, however information concerning three people who were over the age of 18 but treated in child and adult units was also in- cluded.

Meanwhile, the report also revealed that Clare has the lowest rate of children with a registered intellectual disability in Ireland. According the State of the Nation’s Children report, just 148 Clare children had a registered intellectual disability in 2011.

The county’s rate of children with a registered intellectual disability is 4.8 per 1,000 children – almost half the national overage of 7.7 per 1,000 children.

The report does not give any indication as to why Clare should have such a low rate of intellectual disability compared to other counties. Besides being a possible indicator that Clare has a low level of children with intellectual disability, it could also be interpreted to indicate that Clare children with intellectual disabilities are less likely to be diagnosed or are less likely to be officially registered with the statutory bodies once diagnosed.

A HOST of amateur North Clare actors will make their major television debut next Monday in the PJ Curtis film ‘The Road of Souls’.

The film, which was shot on location the Burren in 2011, features a mixture of professional and amateur actors including many members of the hugely successful Corofin Drama Group.

The short film, which was written by Curtis and is partially biographical, tells the story of Patrick, an 11year-old boy and his interaction with a stranger who comes to the Burren in the 1950s.

“It was a memorable experience having a film crew here to turn my little story into something bigger,” said PJ.

“I’m really looking forward to the television screening as it will give people throughout Clare a chance to see the film. It’s a fitting tribute to the cast and crew that worked so hard on the production.”

The cast is lead by a young Clare actor Emmet O’Doherty who plays the role of Patrick and also includes locals Michael Keane, Peter Daffy and Maura Clancy.

The film is the first such work for writer and music producer PJ Curtis and originally appeared in a collection of his short stories entitled ‘The Music of Ghosts’.

PJ himself won a Best Script Award for the film at the 2012 LIT Film Festival. Later this year, PJ’s novel ‘A Nightingale Falling’ will get the big screen treatment as it is set to become a feature film.

‘The Road of Souls’ is produced by Mixed Bag Media, who financed the film along with some assistance from Clare Arts Office. It will be screened on RTÉ 2 on Monday, April 22, at 23.35pm. It will then be available on the RTÉ Player for a further two weeks. To see a trailer for the film visit www.mixedbagmedia.com.

MORE than half of the entire Traveller population in Clare is aged 17 years or younger.

According to The State of the Nation’s Children report released last week, there were a total of 468 Traveller children in Clare in 2011 – the last year on record.

The 2011 census revealed that there were 855 Travellers resident in the county, 417 males and 438 females. These figures mean that just under 55 per cent of the Travellers based in Clare are under 18 years.

The report also indicated that the number of Clare children born to members of the Travelling community has skyrocketed over the last decade. According to the 2002 State of the Nation’s Children report, there were just 401 Traveller children resident in the county. This amounts to an increase of 16.7 per cent in a nine year period.

Meanwhile, the number of children living with a lone parents has also increased dramatically over the past 10 years. According to the report there was a total of 4,348 children living in a single parent household in 2011. This amounts to 14.7 per cent of all children resident in the county for that year.

This number shows a marked increase on the same report carried out in 2002 when there were 3,412 children living in lone parents household in Clare, or 12.3 per cent of the total number of children in Clare.

The annual State of the Nation’s Children report compiles a variety of statistical information about young people in County Clare. Figures in the report show that there were 933 reports of child welfare and protection issues reported to the HSE concerning Clare children in 2011.

The report also revealed that there were a total of 1,163 families with children in need of social housing in Clare in 2011. Of these families, 667 are lone parent families, while 496 are families with two or more children.

This means that 2.7 per cent of Clare families with children were identified as being in need of social housing. However, the total of lone parent families in need of social housing is much higher at 15.34 per cent.

A LOCAL surfer who got into difficulty close to the site of the massive Cliffs of Moher wave was airlifted to safety last week.

A group of four surfers were in the water close to the world famous Aill Na Searrach or Aileen’s Wave at the foot of the Cliffs of Moher when the incident took place.

A number of members of the Doolin unit of the Irish Coast Guard were already in the area when the alarm was raised and were quickly redeployed to the scene.

The man is understood to have been overcome by high waves in excess of 16 feet and separated from the rest of his group. It was first thought that the surfer had been washed ashore at a foot of the Aill Na Searrach – a treacherous location which would have required rescuers to abseil more then 600 feet to rescue him.

Along with a number of shore search terams, the Doolin Unit of the Irish Coast Guard launched its rescue boar and the Shannon based Irish Coast Guard helicopter was also sent to assist.

The surfer was spotted by the rescue helicopter, who lowered a man into the sea to rescue the injured surfer. The casualty was flown to University College Hospital in Galway where he was treated for suspected back and neck injuries, which are not believed to be life threatening. The surfer is understood to be from the local area.