Local Notes: Dolores wins €1,000 in Ballyhaunis Town Hall raffle
Ballyhaunis Community Council and local politicians photographed following the raffle and jumble sale at the Community Hall.
Congratulations to Dolores Byrne, from Gurteen, who won the top prize of €1,000 in the recent draw organised by Ballyhaunis Community Council to raise funds for the Community Hall renovation project.
Among the other winners were Pat and Maura Murphy who won a €150 Aldi voucher while Joe Raftery and Maria Fitzimmons each won a €100 voucher for the local SuperValu. A full list of the 25 prize winners has been published on the Facebook page of Ballyhaunis Community Council which noted: “This fundraising effort has been a great boost to the hall and puts us in a great position to stay on top of our debt repayments.”
The Community Council has borrowings of approximately €150,00 to repay on the recently completed refurbishment of the hall.
Cracks in the wall and floor of the historic Friary church in Ballyhaunis were surveyed recently by the executive architect of Mayo County Council Orla Kennelly who has engaged the Council’s structural engineering staff to look at the building in detail.
Upkeep of the church is the focus of a fundraising effort by a working group made up of local members of the Abbey Trust, the body which has held the property in trust for the community since the departure of the Augustinian friars in 2002.
“One of the cracks risks endangering the gable windows in the church which were made by internationally renowned stained glass artist Harry Clarke a century ago," explained JT Smyth, a member of the Trust which is organising a concert on December 2nd featuring the Three Tenors, a trio with a large national following.
“We are trying to raise money locally to have a fund in place which will allow us apply for grants so that preservation works can be completed,” explained Smyth.
Chairperson of the Abbey Partnership (the management arm of the Trust), Deirdre Finnerty, has meanwhile asked the chief fire officer Tony Shelvin to carry out a pre-fire plan on the Church. The building was recently surveyed by Ballyhaunis Fire Station staff who viewed the building so they are familiar with it in case of an emergency.
Tickets for the Three Tenors concert, priced at €30, are available in the Gem Costcutter, online at Eventbrite, or by calling 087-6434206.
The Annagh Magazine will be on sale from Friday, December 1, in all the usual outlets.
“This year’s magazine is the 46th annual issue and retails at €12,” noted the publishers who describe the publication, at over 200 pages, as “one of the biggest issues in recent years and promises to feature the usual mix of articles, reports and photographs that has made ‘Annagh’ so popular with Ballyhaunis people at home and abroad since 1978".
“The Annagh Magazine Society would like to thank all contributors of written submissions and photographs and our generous patrons - all of whom helped to bring Annagh 2023 to fruition.”
Beginners and improvers who want to master the native language are invited to a fun class every Tuesday evening at the Community Hall. Conducted in a light-hearted manner, the 7pm class costs €5 per head, which includes tea and coffee. The classes are co-organised by Ballyhaunis Community Council and Ballyhaunis Language Café.
A note to local businesses from Ballyhaunis Chamber of Commerce has put the cost of installing Christmas lights in the town at €20,000 and invites a donation of €200 per business to cover the cost.
“Your commitment to supporting the Christmas Lights is crucial to the continued success of ‘Our Town’ at Christmas. This is one of the few town projects that seek your financial help, and we appeal to you to be generous in your contribution. An annual fee of €200 per business would be greatly appreciated, and we look forward to your support in lighting up Ballyhaunis this Christmas.”
The Christmas lights will be switched on at 4.30pm on Sunday, December 3, with carol singing and the blessing of the crib by Fr Stephen Farragher. A Christmas Market will also take place on December 16 in the town square.
The increasingly energetic Ballyhaunis Tidy Towns committee has scored another big win with the granting of €2,500 from the Community Foundation of Ireland to allow the oragnisation to research and draft a plan to reduce waste in the town. A Community Circular Economy Action Plan will examine where single-use items contributing to local littering and dumping can be reduced.
Single-use coffee cups and convenience food packaging from local vendors, for instance, have become a major source of waste on local roads, streets and laneways.
Ballyhaunis Tidy Towns was recently the recipient of a special award at the national Tidy Towns Awards for its Citizen Science programme which enables locals to measure and monitor the quality of water in local rivers.
Higher electricity prices are causing a “huge problem” slowing the transition to sustainable home heating solutions like heat pumps, according to Ballyhaunis native David Connolly, a nationally prominent figure in the renewable energy sector.
David is chief technology officer with Astatine, a multinational firm that advises industries on how to switch to clean sources of heat. The company is hiring a consultant to research how electricity bills are computed in order to advise the Government on how to shift levies from consumers to polluting energy sources.
High electricity prices for households are an “unintended consequence” of government policies over a period of time, which added levies to consumer bills to pay for inclusion of clean energy on the grid, said David Connolly. Originally from Lecarrow outside Ballyhaunis, David was previously head of the Irish Wind Energy Association.
“Historically, it’s been easier to put increased cost onto electricity because everyone is billed and are metred and there’s a small number of electricity suppliers… But it makes more sense for the levies to go on a fossil fuel bill rather than on electricity bills.
“It’s very difficult to figure out what makes an electricity bill so expensive. There are complex layers... the price of generating electricity and the price paid to the grid operator. If we understand a lot of ingredients in the price, we can see what can be taken off electricity and put on fossil fuels.”
Heat pumps are very efficient money-wise provided electricity costs are kept to reasonable levels, explained David.
“If I buy 20 cents a kilowatt hour I get three units of heat for one unit of electricity on a heat pump.”
However, the national plan to decarbonise energy and heating to electricity will only work, said David, if the gap between the cost of electricity and the cost of fossil fuels has to be sufficient to encourage the take-up of heat pumps.
“We have to make sure that electricity isn’t more than two times more expensive than two times the rate of fossil fuels or people will continue to burn fossil fuels.”
David said “there is huge appetite in the corporate sector” for clean energy, due in part to the spike in prices of imported fossil fuels prompted by the Ukraine War.
Likewise, the transition to clean energy is “really starting to bite” in the public sector which has committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, he remarked. That means there are only six years really left.
Chronic understaffing at An Bord Pleanála however, has slowed down the building of wind farms, a key source of clean energy in Ireland. There’s only been one license approved in the past year, noted David.
Solar energy projects, meanwhile, have been surging ahead largely because they don’t have the planning issues faced by wind power but solar isn’t able to generate the kind of volume of clean energy that wind can, he added.
A detailed analysis of socio-economic indicators in the Ballyhaunis area shows that areas outside the town have pulled away from the downtown area.
The Pobal HP Deprivation Index, compiled by the government agency Pobal, shows the better-off parts of the town are the northern perimeter villages like Annagh, Clagnagh and Devlis. This cluster of hinterlands (which also includes Carrowreagh, Coolloughra and Skeaghard) represents the only district “marginally above average” in terms of economic indicators – on data based on census sampling. Some 41.1% of the 101 people surveyed in that cluster have third-level education while male unemployment is at 3.5% and female unemployment at zero.
Data for the downtown area – a sampling of 331 people living in the centre of the town - shows far greater levels of economic disadvantage, with male unemployment levels at 37.5% and female unemployment at 41%. Some 26% of those surveyed said they had third-level education. The town centre area is classed as “disadvantaged” in the Pobal report.
The Bekan area – of 212 people – is also classed as “disadvantaged” in the Pobal index, with higher unemployment (8.7% male, 14.2% female) and lower levels of third-level education (24%) as well as higher dependency levels: 43.4% compared to 39.6% in the aforementioned cluster of hinterlands around Ballyhaunis.
One of the more interesting data samples is that for lone parents. Some 51.7% of those surveyed in the town proper classed themselves as lone parents compared to 12.5% in the townlands (Annagh, Carrowreagh, Devlis etc) referred to above. Only 4.7% of those surveyed in Bekan reported themselves as lone parents.
Ballyhaunis is home to one of the fastest growing populations in Mayo, thanks to high levels of migration of staff taking unskilled food processing jobs in particular. The town is also home to approximately 400 asylum seekers.
