Category: News

THE 500 year-old body of a Clare teenager discovered in April is helping to paint a clear picture of what life was like for the people of Ireland during one of the most violent periods in the country’s history.

Carbon dating of human remains, discovered in a cave on Moneen Mountain, just outside Ballyvaughan, has revealed that the dead person was between 14 and 16 years of age, and was severally malnutritioned.

According to Dr Marion Dowd of IT Sligo, the evidence suggests that the youth crawled into the cave and died, rather than being placed in the cave after death. This suggests that Moneen Mountain was being used as a refuge or meeting place for poor Clare people at this time.

This period, around the time of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, was one of the bloodiest times in Irish history.

“At this time in Ireland, there was religious persecution, a lot of warfare, Gaelic people are being dispossessed of their land and there are lots of famines.

“But to find the remains of one of these individuals and to see, first hand, the evidence of what was going on is very interesting,” said Dr Dowd. “Another mystery is why the remains were in the cave and not in a burial ground – because there were a number of official burial grounds quite close to the cave. It seems that this young person went into the cave, crawled into a small recess in the cave wall and died there.

“This person may have been completely on his own and died in the cave or there may have been a few people hiding out there.”

The excavation also revealed evidence which suggests that Moneen Mountain may have been a significant place for Bronze Age people.

“The other material dates back to 1,000 BC. We discovered a large quantity of broken-up pots and a deer antler. There is something quite unusual about this also, it does not look like a refuge, there was no-one living inside the cave at the time, and we know that the pots were weathered outside,” continued Marion.

GARDAÍ in Clare are appealing for assistance in solving a number of burglaries that took place during the Christmas period.

Between 2pm on Christmas Day and 5.30pm on St Stephen’s Day, costume jewellery was stolen during a break-in to a house in Westwood, Ennis. The culprit gained entry by breaking a rear window.

A burglar used the same method of entry during a burglary in Showground’s View, Ennis. The breakin took place between 1.30pm on Wednesday, December 26 and 3.15am on Thursday, December 27.

As well as stealing a 32-inch Samsung television, Playstation3 and eight games, a Hewlett Packard laptop, 3D Panasonic TV, DVD player and key to the patio doors, the burglars also stole a white Toyota saloon (00 OY 1070), which was later, recovered.

Efforts were made to steal the copper piping from a bathroom in a house in Ballina sometime between 4pm on Saturday, December 22 and 10am on Thursday last.

A Triton shower was stolen from the house in Beechgrove Grange Road, Ballina, after the culprit broke in through a rear window.

In Kilfenora, a house on Doctor’s Hill was broken into between 8pm on St Stephen’s night and 8am the following morning. The house and its contents were disturbed but nothing appears to have been taken.

The occupants of a house in Killernan Miltown Malbay were not as lucky. A sum of money, including sterling, and a white Citreon Berlingo Van Sl59 OFF were stolen from this home some time between 8.30pm and 11.40pm on Friday, December 28. The burglars gained entry to the house by breaking a side window and then stole the keys of the van.

In Kilkee, between 2pm on Thursday, December 27 and 10.30am on Saturday, December 29, an apartment on Circular Road was broken into through the rear door. A 32-inch Toshiba flatscreen TV and some bed clothing was stolen.

Meanwhile, Gardaí are looking for any witnesses to criminal damage of a car which was parked outside the Church in Roslevan on Christmas Eve. Three of the car’s tyres were slashed between 7.30pm and 8.45pm.

CLARE County Council revealed that they would examine eight unfinished housing estates in the county in April where they believe that safety and security has become a serious issue.

The local authority has also con firmed that it believes that half of the county’s Category 4 ‘ghost’ estates should no longer fall into this category, which is the worst category of estates.

According to the local authority, only three of the six housing developments that have been classified by the Department of the Environment as unfinished and developer-abandoned, or Category 4 estates, should still be in the category.

The council say that they intend to contact the Department of the Environment and inform them of their opinion on this.

Speaking at last night’s meeting of Clare County Council, Director of Services, Ger Dollard said that the local authority is deploying “quite a lot of resources” to the issue of the Category 4 developments and said that safety was the responsibility of the developer.

He was responding to a joint motion put forward by Cllr John Crowe (FG) and Cllr Paul Murphy (FG) which asked for details on the condition of so-called ghost estates in the county.

“It is the responsibiity of the property owner, the developer or the receivers to ensure that the site is secure and safe,” said a council spokesperson.

“The council has written to developers and receivers with housing developments on the unfinished list, explaining to them their responsibilities in relation to the safety of the site.”

Speaking on last night’s motion, Cllr John Crowe said that some Clare estates were in a “very, very bad condition”.

“There are estates which are not even one-quarter finished and no place for children to play in. There are open drains and other dangers,” he said.

LESS than a third of Clare’s voters went to the polls to vote on the Children Referendum on Saturday November 10, the lowest turn out in 11 years. Despite the turnout being lower than the national average, the number in favour of changing the constitution was slightly higher, with 61.7 per cent voting yes. As many as 79,905 Clare people were entitled to vote, 197 less than the last referendum. Just 25,808 people from the Banner chose to exercise their democratic right however. As many as 15,868 people voted for the amendment, with 9,846 voting against. There were 94 invalid votes. The county has a history of not going to the polls on questions that would affect the constitution in recent decades, but the November turnout was surpassed only by the weak showing during the first Nice Referendum, the abolition of the death penalty and the criminal courts referendum. In June 2001, just 30.83 per cent of the people of Clare voted on those three referendums. When 49.8 per cent of voters in the county turned out for the Stability Referendum at the end of May voter apathy and lack of information was criticised for what was then the lowest turn out in the county in almost a decade. Six months later it would appear that apathy and lack of engagement has grown to the point where 17.8 per cent more of the county’s population decided not to vote. The drop in voter turnout is significant when compared to June 1999 when 60.05 per cent of the Clare electorate turned out to vote for “Recognition for Local Government”.

In March 2002, just 39.29 per cent of the Clare electorate turned out to vote on the Protection of Human Life in Pregnancy, with 47.05 per cent voting on Nice 2 that October.

The largest turnout for a referendum in recent years in Clare was in June 2004, when 64.6 per cent voted on the Citizenship.

From then until the Stability Referendum the turnout remained over 50 per cent in the Banner county, with 52.48 per cent voting on Lisbon 1 in June 2008, 56.9 per cent voting on the second Lisbon referendum in October 2009, while 56.12 per cent voted on the House of the Oireachtais Inquiries and 57.95 per cent on Judges Remuneration during the Presidential election in October 2011.

While the turnout on Saturday was disappointing for the Government, it still considered it “a historic day for children”.

Speaking at the count centre at the Court House in Ennis after returning officer Pat Wallace declared the Clare result of the Children Referendum, Deputy Pat Breen (FG) said, it was “a truly historic day for our children”.

THE number of people born on Clare soil swelled by one in May when baby Eirinn Christina Robbins Logue came into the world on the side of the road in Corofin.

Eirinn’s parents, Caralyn Robbins and Phil Logue, were about to drop their two older children at their aunt’s house at Laghtagoona in Corofin before carrying on to hospital in Galway, when Eirinn decided that her big moment had arrived.

The momentous birth took place on the road outside Caralyn’s sister Crystel’s house, with dad Phil acting as a more than capable midwife.

“By the time I got to the driveway, I couldn’t even drive up to the house, I had to stop right there. I was like a headless chicken,” said delighted Phil.

“It was me that delivered the baby. Caralyn was standing up, she had got out of the car to try and get into the house, so she was standing up leaning on the door of the jeep. She said ‘the baby is coming, the baby is coming’.

“Sure enough, the baby’s head was already out. She told me that the baby was coming right then so I cupped the baby’s head in my hand. There was a big whoosh and the baby came flying out and I caught it.

“Crystel was on the phone to the 999 operator, who was giving us advice, and she then came over and helped wrap up the baby and we handed it up to Caralyn. Out of the three of us, I think Mum was the most calm. Myself and Crystel were panicking but Caralyn was the most calm of all of us.

“I really have to give my sincere thanks to Crystel, I don’t know what I would have done if she wasn’t there, and Peter and the rest of the ambulance crew and paramedics and also the 999 operator for their professionalism and for taking care of us so well.”

According to Phil, his partner Caralyn had a dream last week that the baby would be born in the car on the way to the hospital and the baby would be born a girl. Weighing just over six pounds, baby Eir- inn is fit and healthy and is already being doted on by her four-year-old sister Isabelle and her three-year-old brother Aiden.

Figures released by the Central Statistic Office (CSO) last week revealed that the number of people born in County Clare have plummeted since the removal of maternity facilities from the county’s hospitals in the late 1980s.

“This is the first of my children to actually have been born on Clare soil and that is something that we are very happy about,” continued Phil.

“I think if we hadn’t already decided on a name for Eirinn, we would have called her Clare, but we already had the name picked.”

A PROBLEM resident was accused of taunting neighbours plagued by anti-social behaviour in November by claiming he would buy their homes if they want to leave a troubled estate.

The man, a convicted criminal, made the claim in a letter delivered to homes in the estate in Ennis.

Residents suffered numerous instances of anti-social behaviour and raised their concerns in a meeting with senior Gardaí in Ennis during in October.

The situation got so bad for one mortgage payer that it was claimed that he has been forced to leave the area to live in another part of Ennis. Other residents are also believed to be considering leaving.

The typed letter was hand delivered by members of the man’s family to certain homes in the estate.

In it the man boasted that he could afford to purchase homes in the estate and give them to members of his family.

In the letter he refers to a wide circle of cousins who he would like to see move into the estate, if his neighbours felt they wanted to leave.

The letter was delivered after a local newsletter highlighted the pres- ence of Garda patrols in the area.

A delegation of residents of the estate had raised their concerns during a meeting at Ennis Garda Station. The week after this report a Traveller resident in that Ennis estate hit back at what he said was racism at work.

The man rubbished claims by residents that he had been the cause of anti-social behaviour in the estate since he moved some months ago, or that he had been the reason a person moved out of the estate.

“The only thing that’s happened in the five months I’m living there is the young kids took a football and kicked it around the green.

“Children is children. That’s been the size of it,” he said.

The man, who admitted that he had sent a letter to some residents in the estate offering to buy their houses if they wanted to sell, told us that the letter was ‘sarcastic’ in parts.

“I was sarcastic in the letter. I admit that. The bit about the horses eating the grass was sarcastic. I know that.

“But they think they’re better than me. They haven’t taken the time to get to know me. They judged me because I’m a Traveller. And that’s racist,” he says.

The letter he had hand delivered to some of the residents in the estate invited them to have a cup of the tea with him.

MAGIC mushrooms located in the Burren could hold the key to tackling world hunger in the coming years. Scientists have discovered that networks of microscopic fungi play a key role in aiding plants to extract and process nutrients from the soil, it emerged.

According to Dr Ray Woods of the British organisation Plantlife, intensive farming, fertiliser and human intrusion have destroyed these fungal networks across Europe, with the Burren’s wild grasslands now considered as a fungal “arc” for the future of European farming.

Studies showed that these tiny fungi can help plants to fight off disease and can even allow for the flow of nutrients from one plant to another over large distances.

“We are just starting to learn how vital these fungi are for growing crops. They are intimately connecting with well-known plants, such as hazel, using 50 or 60 different types of fungi to grow,” said Dr Woods.

“The wild flowers of the Burren are a perfect example of this. There are so many different plants and flowers there and none of them ever seem to dominate.

“In the Burren, you have one of the last unimpacted areas of grassland anywhere in the world. It is really one of the very few places in the world where research into fungal networks can still be done. It is an arc for these fungi.”

One of the most important abilities of these fungal networks is helping plants to extract nitrogen from the soil.

At present, virtually all world agriculture is built on the use of large amounts of industrialised nitrogen fertiliser, which is made using large amount of oil.

As global oil supplies continue to dwindle, the use of oil in producing fertiliser is considered by many to be the biggest challenge facing world agriculture in the next 50 years. This has prompted many people to examine the role that the intact Burren fungal networks could have on world agriculture.

“People are already coming to the Burren [to study the fungi] but it is difficult at times to know who is coming and what they are doing. You come across people from universities in Germany, Holland, Ireland and the UK in the Burren,” said Stephen Ward of the BurrenBeo Trust.

“If they are doing original research, then chances are they would contact an organisation like the BurrenBeo Trust because we can be helpful.”

REPORTER Andrew Hamilton became interested in all things ecumenical during the holy month of November. He reported that the Killaloe Diocese was facing a “crisis” of holy orders, with the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) predicting that the entire diocese will be serviced by a handful of “ShannonDoc priests” in as little as a decades time.

The organisation, which now represents more than 1,000 parish priests in Ireland, said massive changes were required by all the Irish Bishops and the Vatican if this doomsday scenario was to be avoided.

According to Fr Tony Flannery of the ACP, the priesthood is set to become a transient profession in Ireland, with a much reduced number of priest delivering sacrament across many parishes – without having the time to be based in any individual community.

A spokesperson from the Killaloe Diocese told The Clare People , that there had been active moves to engage with lay community in the diocese over the last 12 months – there are some issues which can only be changed at Vatican level.

“Priests in the Killaloe Diocese are already doing the work that three priests would have been doing ten years ago, and this is going to get much worse, very quickly. This is a crisis, no questions about it. In 10 or 20 years time there will be only a handful of priests and they will be just saying mass in an area and moving on – they will be like ShannonDoc priests,” said Fr Tony Flannery.

“The ACP now have more than 1,000 priests in our organisation and it is growing all the time. This is in spite the feeling that priests are being actively discouraged by the powers that be to join. So it shows you that there is a real desire among the priests for change.”

According to Fr Brendan Quinlavin, spokesperson for the Killaloe Diocese, Bishop Kieran O’Reilly had been engaged in a “listening” process over the last 12 months designed to allow lay people to have more say in the diocese.

In a separate story it was highlighted that ordaining women priests was one of the main changes suggested in a revolutionary new document produced by the Diocese of Killaloe as part of the listening process.

The process, which was started by Bishop Kieran O’Reilly last year, involved more than 700 priests and lay church members in the diocese and was viewed as a blueprint for the future of the Catholic Church in County Clare.

The document also recommended the creation of new active roles for lay people in the diocese and fostering a greater appreciation for local priests as two of its other main aims.

The document also highlight the main challenges faced by the church in the Killaloe diocese with mass attendance as low as 10 per cent in some parishes. Other fears also include the prospect of church closures in rural part of Clare, as priest numbers continue to decline.

“This [listening] process is an invitation to engage again and to be an integral part of our future,” said Fr Brendan Quinlivan, spokesperson for the Diocese of Killaloe.” The next step in this process is unclear as many of the recommended changes would require a change of official church doctrine in the Vatican.”

A LONG-AWAITED rescue centre for the Doolin Unit of the Irish Coastguard is the next top priority of the Department of Transport, according to Minister for Transport, Leo Varadkar (FG).

Speaking at a joint Coastguard/ RNLI event on Sunday, December 30, Varadkar named Doolin as the next station-house for construction, once a new building for the Killybegs Unit of the Irish Coastguard has been completed.

Construction is already well underway on the Donegal station, with work set to be finished early in 2013. With no new cuts to coastguard funding announced in last month’s budget, this could leave the way open for the start of construction in Doolin later in 2013.

A campaign for a new station at Doolin has been ongoing for almost two decades and has been delayed on a number of occasions over the years because of planning issues, difficulty in acquiring land and uncertainty about funding for the project.

Planning permission for a new rescue centre at Doolin was granted in 2010. The centre will include a new two-storey rescue centre on the site of the current facility as well as a single-storey, three-bay boat and vehicle store.

The current station is prone to flooding and is too small for the Doolin Unit to store all of its rescue equipment and boats. This means that some of the unit’s crafts have to be stored off-site, creating the possibility of a delay in responding to some emergency situation.

“Funding for the Coastguard has been protected for the second year running in the Budget. Similarly, funding for the RNLI and Mountain Rescue will be maintained at current levels through to 2016,” said the transport minister.

“These are essential services and much of the cost is met by volunteers. But I particularly want to pay tribute to the huge number of volunteers who save lives every week of the year. Without these volunteers, it simply wouldn’t be possible to provide the same level of emergency response.”

The 2012 Irish Coastguard statistics were also released on Sunday and showed that the year had been the busiest on record for the service. Nationally the coastguard saved 161 lives and recovered 88 in thousands of operations over the last one month.

While individual number of the Doolin and the Killaloe units of the Irish Coastguard have yet to be released, the Shannon based Coast Guard helicopter recorded its busiest year on record with 191 missions.

The coastguard also fielded a total of 325 hoax calls from members of the public, a figure described my Minister Varadkar as “unacceptably high”. A we e k o f m ild we a t h e r a n d a lo t le ss ra in t h a n we h a ve b e e n e xp e rie n c in g o ve r t h e p a st we e k o r so .

CARERS from all over Clare took to the streets of Ennis in December to raise their concerns about budgetary cuts to the Respite Care Allowance. More than 50 people too part in the impromptu including parents of young children with disabilities, older parents of adults with special needs and full-time carers of the elderly.

One of the organisers, Niamh Daly, said that a similar protest organised in Dublin by the Carers Association was an indication at how upset people were but, as most carers cannot travel to protest, the carers of Clare decided to have their

say on their own streets.

“Carers cannot all get to Dublin but, at the end of the day, we have to have our voice heard,” she said.

Many more Clare carers were unable to attend the protest as the people they care for are house-bound and therefore could not come to En nis.

It is not just the cut to the respite grant, however, that is affecting Clare’s carers. Family carers, providing unpaid care to family mem- bers and loved ones, have been seriously affected through the number of cumulative cuts, including the cut to the Household Benefit Pack- age, increases to the prescription charge from 50 cent to € 1.50, the new carbon tax on fuel and the drug payment scheme threshold increase from € 132 to € 144. The Carers Association said it was extremely disappointed with the level of reduction of over 19 per cent in the respite grant paid to over 77,000 family carers, 20,000 of whom receive no other support from the State for providing full-time care for a family member from their own resources. The grant is designed to be used by carers to buy in home care or pay for residential respite care for the caredfor person in order to give the carer a much needed break from their caring role. However, many carers are using this grant to pay for necessary therapies and services for those they are caring for. Despite intense pressure from lobby groups and concerned citizens the government has, to date, help strong on the issue of the Respite Care Allowance. It is as yet unclear whether the Cares Association or other interested organisation will host more protests or other actions in 2013. Wed02January13