French town spends €30,000 on garden to honour links with Mayo

A town in northern France has spent €30,000 on a garden to honour its links with Ballyhaunis. 

The Square de Ballyhaunis in Guilers, a town in the Brettony region of northern France, has become very popular with locals.

“The park is a passageway renovated last year in a Zen style, many people use it every day,” explained Thierry Mestrius, chair of the Ballyhaunis-Guilers Twinning Committee who spoke to the Western People. 

The Square de Ballyhaunis was built and paid for by the local government of Guilers, a town near Brest on the French northwest coast.

Rena Burke, chair of the Ballyhaunis Twinning Committee, hosted Mr Mestrius and two other visitors from Guilers said she visited Guilers in early September 

"Pairc Ballyhaunis there is a credit to the committee in Guilers," she remarked.

During her visit, Rena and her husband Tom photographed themselves with Marie Therese and René Floch, a couple they first met in 1984 through the twinning process.

Ms Burke has been reaching out to the Ballyhaunis Tidy Towns group and Mayo County Council to refurbish the memorial and stone garden built in 1985 to mark the twinning of Ballyhaunis with Guilers. Located in the carpark near the library, the monument hosts a sundial donated by the people of Guilers in 1985. Ms Burke and her committee has been seeking to have the space cleaned and refurbished with funds from the council and local business community.

It's unclear if the generosity of the Guilers government will be matched by Mayo County Council.

The Guilers monument in Ballyhaunis was visited by Thierry Mestrius during his group’s three visits to the town, most recently in September. 

“The last time we visited was in 2008 and now September 2025.” 

In Guilers, as in Ballyhaunis, keeping the twinning relationship relevant to younger generations remains a challenge. 

“The old residents know the twinning well, the new generation much less, there is a sign at the entrance to the town but I am not sure that it is enough," he explained.

Travel across Europe has become much easier in the 40 years since the twinning agreement between Ballyhaunis and Guilers was signed, with EU enlargement and low-fare airlines facilitating waves of migration of Eastern Europeans into towns in Ireland and France.

Relationships between families in Ballyhaunis and Guilers is central to the longevity of the twinning, said Mr Mestrius. 

“It's easy to travel across Europe at a low price via Ryanair, easyJet, and other airlines… The success of the twinning is due to the exchanges with the Irish. Twinning only survives through family links.” 

Cutbacks in spending by the French government, which faces a debt crisis, may curb resources for twinning celebrations, he worries. 

“We need to reactivate the links between us through more regular communication. We may need to find a simpler way of exchanging information to reduce our expenses because I am not sure we will have as many subsidies as in the past.”

Thierry Mestrius has no specific date yet for another trip to Ballyhaunis, “but we are counting on the Irish coming soon". One of the originators of the twinning in the early 1980s, Ballyhaunis businessman Gerry McGarry describes the East Mayo town as “an exciting, progressive, active community” at the time. 

“There were 81 shops or business premises, sales promotions attracted visitors from throughout Connacht, we had trade fairs and European Union conferences. Ballyhaunis initiated the national campaign for European Union Regional Development programmes. Everybody was involved. 

“A further international success was the twin-town association with Guilers. Over 50 from Ballyhaunis travelled to Guilers… it was a social, cultural, language and commercial experience. It was a fantastic holiday, which was repeated when people from Guilers came to Ballyhaunis.”