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A YOUNG man who demanded €20 from another man, in a threaten- ing way, has been sentenced to six months’ detention.

Patrick McCarthy (19), of Pearse Avenue, Ennis, was convicted of two offences, arising out of separate inci- dents in Ennis last year.

Inspector Tom Kennedy told Ennis District Court that Brian Custy was having a cigarette, outside his place of work, the Queen’s Hotel, on Janu- Za ar URAC elon

He was approached by the accused, who demanded €20.

‘He told Mr Custy he would break his neck if he didn’t give it to him,” said Inspector Kennedy.

On another occasion, October 29, 2006, the accused was seen running down a Street and rugby tackling an “innocent” person to the ground.

No complaint was _ forthcoming from the injured party and the ac-

cused was charged under the Public Order Act, arising from that inci- elem

Defending solicitor William Cahir said his client was familiar with Mr Custy and did ask him for €20.

‘He didn’t intend it to be 1n a threat- ening, menacing way,” he said.

The solicitor said he accepted his chent’s behaviour was “out of order” on the night of October 29.

Judge Joseph Mangan imposed a six month detention sentence for the incident outside the Queen’s and two months for the other offence, both sentences to run concurrently.

He refused an application to back- date the sentence to July 6, when the accused went into custody.

Mr Cahir asked for an explanation for the refusal and the judge replied, “If I had contemplated backdating it, I’d probably have imposed a longer term.”

He fixed a bond in the event of an appeal.

THE urban/rural divide and the posi- tion of the west of Ireland as a central driving force in forming the identity of the modern Ireland are two of the main themes of Wild Honey, the fourth Burren Annual Exhibition, which comes to the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan next month.

The annual exhibition, which this year will be curated by Michael Dempsey, features the work of nine Irish and international artists who have at some stage based their work outside of “The Pale’.

The exhibition will be opened on August 18 by Mike Fitzpatrick, cura- tor of the Limerick City Art Gallery and Ireland’s Commissioner for the

Venice Biennale 2007, and will run until September 29.

“Wild Honey offers the viewer the possibility of studying the relation- ship between reality and visual cli- chés of working outside The Pale,’ said Michael Dempsey.

“The selected works reflect and interpret the cultural and political changes that Ireland has undergone since the 1990s. They investigate the collective imagination of a genera- tion of artists living in a ‘new’ soci- ety caught in its own past, but none- theless looking to the future.”

Each year the Burren College of Art invites a prominent art world fig- ure to curate a number of artists of his or her own choice for an exhibi- tion of national significance.

Based in Galway, Dempsey has in- troduced many prominent artists to a west of Ireland audience. As found- ing curator of the “Tulca’ season of visual art in Galway, he developed new hybrid ways of approaching cultural production within commu- nities.

‘Naturally, the sources for each artist’s work include real places and personal imagery, as well as images created by the media, popular culture and even urban/rural myths. Like the avant-garde artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, they respond with skepticism or downright rejection to the idea of visual representation of a reality of ever more elusive complexity. Their survival strategies involve navigat- ing real and imagined territories –

geographic, political, economic and social.”

The exhibition will include work from Stephen Brandes, Dorothy Cross, Blaise Drummond, Patrick Hall, Ronnie Hughes, Fergus Mar- tin, William McKeown, Isabel Nolan and Niamh O’ Malley.

‘““Michael’s idea for this exhibition expresses one of the central interests of the Burren College of Art; how the seemingly peripheral west is in fact central to Irish identity,” said Timo- thy Emlyn Jones, dean of Burren Solero wa uae

‘We are deeply indebted to the Arts Office of Clare County Council for its invaluable support of this exhibi- tion, without which the exhibition could not have taken place.”

CALLS have been made to name and shame people who abuse recycling facilities by leaving their empty bags and boxes or just dumping the cans and bottles in front of the bins.

Clir Pascal Fitzgerald made the call ata meeting of the Killaloe area com- mittee of the council.

He told how staff at the council’s new offices in Westbury are “obliged to go out and clean up after people who leave a mess at the recycling fa- cility – it’s not our job. We have CCTV cameras so why is it that we are not

catching people dumping?”

The Labour councillor told officials and fellow councillors that some peo- ple who arrive at the bottle bank “are so lazy that they just dump boxes full of bottles at the foot of the bins – they don’t even put them in the recycling bins. We need to prosecute people who are doing this and expose their names in the media”.

Cio OM Coe Domne Ne One han said that there have been 19 pros- ecutions on foot of such behaviour.

“But people can be very creative about how they park their cars so that we can’t identify them,” he said.

He added that the council’s litter warden is “very active’ in pursuit of offenders “but he has to have some- thing to go on – acar reg or a name”.

He added that the problem is not one which only applied to east Clare but consideration had been given to putting a refuse bin at the re-cycling Station in the new Westbury Centre.

“That was discounted because where ever we put in refuse bins they are abused by people dumping their household rubbish.”

Cllr Tony O’Brien said that the “real problem is the mentality of people who do that. What we have to do is

ring the warden when we see this hap- pening – take car registration numbers so the offenders can be tracked down – it doesn’t matter if its your neighbour. It’s the only way we’ll stop this and find out who is doing this so we can prosecute them.”

OOo) (oe y Cn det lam some Ker AWE Bho that there would be a pub opening for business in the centre shortly and asked whether a barrier might be erected to keep people out of the cen- tre at night after pub hours.

He was told this wouldn’t be possible as the centre is not in council owner- ship or control.

TRADITIONAL music is once again coming to the fore in north Clare this July and August with the beginning of a number of weekly events organ- ised by Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eire- AMOR

The Seisiun series of Summer mu- sic, dance and storytelling evenings has opened for the summer in En- nistymon and Corofin, with crowds of local and tourists in attendance to soak up some traditional Irish atmos- je) aston

“We have a total of about 25 musi- cians each night. The evening starts at 9pm and goes on to Ilpm. Well, it’s Supposed to finish at 11pm but we would often run a few minutes over

because of all the talent on show,” said John Moloney from the Ennisty- mon Branch of Comhaltas.

“The first hour is structured. We have music, dancing singing and storytellers. Then at 10 we break for some tea and a bite of brac. The second hour is totally informal. We give people the chance to get up themselves and sing a song or have a dance. It’s totally casual and eve- ryone is welcome to join in in the oe (one

Ennistymon’s Teach Ceoil is the venue on Monday evenings, while the emphasis shifts down the road to Corofin’s own Teach Ceoil on Thurs- day evening. Indeed sessions will take place in 32 venues throughout the country during the months of

July and August.

The Seisiin series prides itself on achieving the highest level of authen- ticity and avoiding any of the gim- micks that are sometimes associated with traditional Irish music for tour- TSA

“It is a really authentic experience. It’s an old-fashioned trad night. It’s like being invited into an old-fash- ioned Irish kitchen for a cup of tea, a song and a dance. It’s great for the locals but it’s even better for the tour- ists. We had a group of Norwegians in last week dancing and singing away, continued john.

“We run classes here during the winter in music, step dancing and set dancing. The Seisitn gives the people doing the classes a chance to

show off their stuff. We would get a lot of their parents and grandparents in to have a look and see how they have been getting along and what they have been learning.”

Admission costs €10 including tea and light refreshments. For more information, contact John Molo- ney (Ennistymon) at 065 7071467 and Peggy Liddy (Corofin) at 065 toe LOre

A DETERMINED crew of 16 young- sters from Scariff and surround- ing areas took off last Thursday on a mission of mercy to help rebuild lives shattered by a natural disaster.

Fishbowl America is the name the group of young people and adults choose for their mission to work in the Hurricane Katrina disaster area MOD RML UDO Sb Seles m

The group from east Clare and south east Galway are all members of the highly active Fishbowl Youth

Club in Scariff.

The club has a history of interna- tional work and have previously been involved in or hosted eight interna- tional projects.

This however is their most ambi- tious to date. The 16 volunteers will spend two weeks helping to rebuild one of the worst affected areas in the Gulf Coast.

They will concentrate their efforts in the town of Bay, St Louis situated on the coast of Mississippi.

Prior to Katrina the town had up- wards of 8,000 residents but the

buildings in the area were completely decimated by the hurricane and even now, two years on from the disaster, only a handful of residents have been able to return to the area.

The group have spent the last year organising the trip and carrying out a number of different fund raising events around the county to help pay SDMA AYA

The youngsters have done every- thing from baby-sitting to busking and even as late as Wednesday, they were on the streets of Ennis, playing guitar, singing their hearts out and

collecting.

“Its been a long year but we’ve put everything we had into raising mon- ey to go,” said group member, Fiacra aah

“Some of our ideas worked out better than others but we got there in the end and we’re really looking forward to getting there and getting stuck in.”

AN incredible 92 years in the mak- ing, Irish-American artist Ruth Mc- Namara-Duff stages her debut Irish exhibition at the Kenny Gallery in Lahinch this week.

Born in 1915, Ruth has worked as a professional artist in California all her life.

It was during a trip to her ances- tral home in Clare, however, that the creative seed for her latest series of work was sown.

““T visited Ireland in 2000, and went to the Cliffs of Moher. I was amazed at the beauty of them. I said, ‘when

I get home I’m going to paint LOO Cliffs of Moher’. I didn’t do quite 100 of them but it was a great inspi- ration to me,” she said.

“T have done a number of oils and watercolours of the cliffs. Even though they are similar in lots of ways, they are all very unique and CHES Keno) 0 me

Ruth’s grandmother, Ella Kennedy, left Clare at age 14, during the fam- ine, and sailed to San Francisco on a mammoth voyage through the Straits of Magellan on the southern tip of South America.

It was there that she met fellow Clare emigrant James McNamara,

who worked mining for gold in Grass Valley, and the pair gave birth to sev- en children, including Ruth’s father Owen.

“This journey is almost like I’m completing their journey back to Clare again. It’s like the end of a large circle. In a lot of ways, this trip is for my father,” she said.

“T feel that I wasn’t born myself un- til I was 40. I don’t think that I really found myself until then. You do get a different perspective on life.

“Right now, I am so eager to do things and to paint. I have a lot of canvases at home in my apartment and I know exactly what I want to do

with them.”

In total, Ruth has painted the Cliffs of Moher more than 60 times. She will show 15 pieces at the exhibi- tion, which she shares with Irish art- ists Tom Greaney, Roger McCarthy, Mary Horan, Michael Hanarahan, Deborah Donnelly, Marie Noonan McDermott, Carmel Madigan, Una O’Brien, Kate Beagan and Simone Walsh.

The exhibition features a wide range of styles and mediums and opened in Kenny’s Gallery Lahinch on July 21.

For more, check out www.lahin- chartgallery.com.

THE roll out of the Breastcheck serv- ice to Clare is imminent, according to organisers, but a date has not yet leroy eM-DeneLOleNeTesrem

The national breast-screening pro- eramme has been available to wom- en in the east of the country for a number of years and plays a key role in early identification of cancer.

There are 30 new cases of breast cancer in Clare every year, and 13 deaths according to the most recent figures available for breast cancer

patients in Clare in 2002. Early de- tection is vital for the successful treatment of this cancer.

A spokesperson for the Breastcheck service would only confirm that the service would be available to women in Clare “later in the year” through a screening unit in Galway or mobile USD RSE

Initially the programme will sys- tematically screen women aged be- tween 50 and 65 years, eventually being expanded to women aged 70. Women will be screened on a two- year basis.

MOTORBIKE enthusiasts in En- nis are on the road again aiming to break records and at the same time highlight the important work of the Simply Said project.

A group that previously re-stored a vintage motorbike as part of project to highlight adult education programmes in the county are now setting their sights on another chal- lenge.

This time the plan is to restore an- other motorbike from scratch and then race the finished article around Mondello International motor racing circuit.

Its all to do with the Simply Said

– a collection of writings produced annually by students attending Clare Adult Basic Education Service (CABES).

An active member of adult educa- tion programmes in Clare, Jacko McMahon wants to restore the mo- torbike in time to mark next year’s 20th anniversary of Simply Said.

The first stage of that process be- gins in Ennis this month with the launch of a four-team soccer tourna- ment involving teams from around the town.

The teams captained by local men Tommy Leahy, Jim McMahon, Ed- die Walsh and Basil Whelan will play-off against each other for the Paddy Coughlan trophy.

Money raised from the event will go towards the purchase of parts for the motorbike restoration project.

Community and voluntary bod- ies such as Clare VEC, Clare Youth Service and the Congress Informa- tion Opportunity Centre all co-oper- ated on previous restoration projects.

A previous contributor to Simply Said Jacko wanted to mark the 20th anniversary of the project.

He also hopes to enlist the help of people like Jimmy Meere, Engi- neering Instructor with Clare Youth Service Terry Considine, Adult Edu- cation Organiser with Clare VEC Dr Sean Connellan, who donated time and effort to previous projects.

Jacko said, “It was an opportu-

nity not be missed. Simply Said is a great project and I hope to be able do something to mark the 20th an- niversary ’.

The 19th edition of Simply Said was recently launched by Bishop Wille Walsh and featured contributions from over 100 students. CABES pro- vides one to one voluntary tuition to adult learners to improve their read- ing and writing skills. Over 1,000 people avail of the service in Clare each year.

Mr Hession also said that the radiol- ogy staff in Limerick has agreed to take on extra work, when Clare wom- en are referred there from September ‘‘on the promise from the HSE that all this is going to get sorted out in terms of we get a proper breast centre”.

Mr Hession said that there would be no preferential treatment for women from Limerick and any woman pre- sented with a lump will be seen with- ht Wiere) ©

Meanwhile he is supporting Lim- erick as a centre of excellence. Mr Hession fears that there are a lot of misunderstandings about the service.

“Radiology is the diagnosis of breast cancer or the exclusion of breast can- cer after that our job is essentially done. The treatment is basically on- cology, surgery, radiotherapy,” he said.

He said that there are two differ- ent types of screening. The screen- ing breast service is the Breastcheck service, which has yet to be rolled out in the west offering mammograms to women in a certain age category.

“Tt is like going to the dentist with no symptoms,” said Mr Hession.

“What we are dealing with is sys- tematic breast disease. It is basically a woman either in between her invi- tations to Breastcheck or before she would even be asked, she developed symptoms be it pain or a lump or something like that. It is that group of patients that would be referred to the systematic breast service,’ he said.

Approximately 3,000 women a year go through the radiology department in Limerick, while 500 to 600 were receiving mammograms in Ennis every year.

Breastcheck will reduce both of

these numbers significantly accord- ing to Mr Hession.

“There is a significant waiting list for mammograms here as people are requesting screening mammograms, which GPs have a right to ask for. Un- fortunately we don’t have the slack in the system that we can facilitate them in the time scale they would want,’ he said.

‘“T am not speaking on behalf of the HSE, I am the person in charge of administration with the department of radiology and the advice we have been given is to make a systematic service work, a radiologist needs to be reading a thousand mammograms

a year. The technician doing them should be doing at least 20 a week.”

“The purpose of that is that these people get very experienced at what they are doing and very good at what they are doing. It also allows for the policing of results. So if a tumour is missed or it is a delayed diagnosis, it is all centralised and it is all open to analysis as to what happened and why did it happen. It 1s to put everything in one area, to pool the expertise, not just radiologists and breast surgeons. You are meant to have more than one surgeon as well, a pathologist, the doctor who looks at a specimen un- der a slide.

“The triple assessment clinic is Where a lot of women with lumps should go so they can be seen by a surgeon that day. That surgeon will refer them for imaging, which will be a mammogram or ultra sound, that depends on the woman. Cytolo- gist would be taken at that stage,” he said.

“The unit at Limerick 1s not a dig- ital system but the next system we hope to put in would be digital,” said Mr Hession.

“Technically it is very exact and it is policed and certainly no one is shy in breast screen washing laundry.”

“Unfortunately not all cancers are detectable. A mammography is not a clean bill of health,’ he said. “And they should not be taken as that. Cer- tainly if a woman has a mammogram and still feels a lump, and it is not rare, that still needs to be pursued. It does not mean it 1s missed, it just means it 1s invisible. Mammograms extenuates certain characteristics in a tumour but if that tumour does not have it or that lump does not have it, it is invisible.

“The real thrust of it is you are go- ing to a service that is designed by international best practice to deliver that service. It is not that we will have a little bit out in Nenagh and a little bit in Ennis. It 1s inconvenient, we were aware that it is less than conven- lent,’ he said.

THE CONSTRUCTION Industry Federation (CIF) has rubbished re- ports of a major collapse 1n the build- ing sector, claiming that the current downturn is part of a natural cycli- cal pattern and will correct itself shortly.

CIF Secretary for the Mid-West Region, Conor O’Connell, said yes- terday that even though he did expect redundancies following the builders’ holiday, the figures had been blown out of proportion.

‘There is no doubt about it, all the anecdotal evidence suggests that there will be some lay offs around the holidays, but if you look at the figures there has always been a cycli- cal pattern,” he said.

“The run up to the builders holi- days has always been a time when contractors review their staffing lev- els, that has been the case year in and year out.

“So it is very hard to know until af- ter it happens what will take place on the ground. It’s very hard to predict how long a down cycle will take to

run its course, and I’m not sure that we will even see the downturn that a lot of people are predicting.

‘There is an awful lot of scaremon- gering going on at the moment and people are being scared off from making that first purchase. I’d nearly bet my bottom dollar that come next spring there will be a turnaround in the market again.”

While the CIF predict a downturn, the organisation believes that work- ers will simply transfer to the com- mercial sector.

“The outlook for the industry is

still very good. It has boomed over the years and this talk of a big down- turn and a lot of people getting laid off is a bit too dramatic. It is a cycli- cal market and always will be.

‘That said, we do expect to see a significant amount of workers to transfer from house building sec- tor to the general contracting sector. This country is still playing catch about on the services and infrastruc- ture being built up. For example, the provision of a wastewater and sew- age infrastructure,’ Mr O’Connell concluded.