Local Notes: Great win for Ballyhaunis basketball team
The Devils Basketball team from Ballyhaunis have reached the plate final after a great games against Ballina Braves. They are pictured with coach Tracy Cunnane.
Residents of Ballyhaunis will be invited to give their views and ideas on the town’s development on February 7th and 8th during a public consultation run by the Town Centre First development plan being drafted by an urban renewal consultancy on behalf of Mayo County Council and a group of local community representatives.
Running from 4pm to 8pm at the Community Hall, the consultations will be carried out by a Carrick-on-Shannon based company, TBLA, which has been appointed by Mayo County Council to draw up the Ballyhaunis Town Centre First Plan. Assisting TBLA will be a team of students and staff from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).
Ballyhaunis is only the second town in Mayo selected for the initiative by Mayo County Council which will draw down €30,000 from the Government for a Ballyhaunis development plan to be drafted by TBLA after consultation with the local community.
Ballyhaunis Community Hall will be the place to be on Saturday, February 15th, for fans of country and folk music as well as social dancing.
Gerry Carney, David O'Connor, Julie Healy and Patsy Mc Caul will take to the stage alongside Margaret White, Mark Finn and Martin Fitzmaurice. Also appearing is a popular folk group, Le Cairde.
The evening – a fundraiser for the renovation of the gallery at the hall - gets underway at 8pm with a €10 entry fee and a raffle in aid of the Mayo Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA). Refreshments will be served.
The operator of popular local café, McHugh's, has highlighted the impact of the rise in minimum wage on local business.
Rory McHugh described the rise, the second in two years, as “a killer” for businesses like his.
“In our 12 years in business, the minimum wage has gone from €7.20 to €13.50 so it’s nearly doubled but there’s no way that our prices have doubled.
“You can’t have a situation where you have to put it on the customer or you will lose customers,” noted Mr McHugh who said he’s trying to keep his sandwich prices below €10.
McHugh’s absorbed seven separate price increases for coffee in 2024. Meat prices also rose.
The only way the company has absorbed prices is by shortening its opening hours, closing at 4pm in some of its locations.
“I don’t want to do that, it’s bad for the customer who wants to come after four for a coffee or something nice but it’s our only way of controlling costs," he explained.
A prediction Rory McHugh made to this column in mid-2024 about a spate of closures has come to pass, he adds. According to the Restaurant Association of Ireland, there were 600 closures in the year up to the end of October.
Mr McHugh welcomes the Tribe chain opening up a few doors from his café.
"They do different products to us, we focus on sandwiches. It’s great for the town.”
A new Indian restaurant set to open on Main Street will bring a “unique” offering to Ballyhaunis.
Zameer Abbas, who also operates the Sandro’s fast food restaurant in the town, took over what was formerly La Spezia restaurant and will open the Topgrill Indian Restaurant and Takeaway in the coming weeks.
“It’ll mostly be take away but we also have a few tables for eating in. We will serve Indian curries, perri perri that kind of thing,” he told the .
From the city of Gujrat in the northern Pakistani province of Punjab, Zameer moved to Ireland 16 years ago and has for the past 14 years run the Sandro’s takeaway in Ballyhaunis.
Zameer believes there is an opening for an Indian takeaway in Ballyhaunis as the town is already well served by fast food offerings as well as several eat-in restaurants. Business has been good for Sandro’s recently, he said, while the fact that it’s staffed by family members means there’s less pressure from the recent rise in the minimum wage.
Being a family-run business also allows the takeaway to open much later than other establishments, said Zameer: the new Indian restaurant will open from four in the afternoon until 1am, the same hours as Sandro’s currently keeps, closing at 2am on Saturdays.
The Local Link rural travel routes serving Ballyhaunis are going very well, accoriding to Jack Flynn who drives the weekly services. He said there’s good demand for the services which take passengers from villages into Ballyhaunis on Thursdays and Fridays.
Managed by the National Transport Authority, TFI Local Link is funded by the Government through the Rural Transport Programme and run in Mayo by Mayo Community Transport Co Ltd.
Jack takes passengers from Cloonfad into Ballyhaunis every Thursday. The bus also collects passengers in Gorthaganny for the trip into Ballyhaunis. Also on Thursdays, Mr Flynn drives the Local Link bus through Logboy, Irishtown and Ballindine, taking passengers to Claremorris.
On Fridays, the service collects passengers in the Aghamore and Tooreen for a trip to Ballyhaunis. A separate service connects Kilkelly with Swinford on Tuesdays.
The aim of TFI Local Link is to provide quality nationwide community-based public transport in rural Ireland that responds to local needs. Door-to-door services typically pick up and drop off passengers at their own door and bring them to services like the doctor, post office and supermarket. The service is free to social welfare recipients while others pay a very affordable €2.50 per trip.
Aside from scheduled local services, Local Link also operates shared transport on a referral basis for the HSE. Anyone seeking to use the Local Link service can contact driver Jack Flynn on 083-3335459.
Ballinlough brewery Black Donkey will focus on four core beers after being buffeted by the rise in product development costs and tepid consumer demand.
“It’s hard to sell anything at the high end, resulting in a reduced market size... People’s incomes haven’t risen in line with price increases,” explained Black Donkey founder and owner Richard Siberry.
Mr Siberry says his company has in the past four years weathered a rise in business costs normally seen in a decade. The closure of F&B outlets nationwide has also resulted in loss of custom for suppliers like breweries, he explained.
The reduction in VAT won’t necessarily result in cheaper prices in-store because these businesses will also be paying higher wage bills after the rise in the minimum wage.
Mr Siberry had in recent years launched a range of new beers but will now focus on his best sellers as consumers cut back. This January so far has been “harder than others,” he noted.
“I talked to another brewer in Mayo about how little was sold in January, it’s industry-wide.
“I see retailers with stock left over from before Christmas. It’s not just craft beer, it’s the industrial brewers too. Christmas sales weren’t as good as hoped for.”
Mr Siberry sees Ireland’s licensing laws as the biggest impediment to breweries like his, limiting access to sales outlets.
“A filling station next door to our brewery can sell wine with a license from Gardaí but to sell beer they require a license purchased from the extinguishment of an existing license, a license that costs over €60,000.”
Ironically, a system designed to protect pubs is undermining them, he noted.
"The only ones who can afford the licenses are big retailers like Aldi and Lidl who have been under-cutting pub prices.”
While overall beer consumption is down, consumption of craft brews hasn’t fallen compared to the fall of big brewers’ brands.
Illegal dumping remains a serious annoyance for the Rafiq family of Hazelhill which is collecting two skips of rubbish in as many months dumped on their lands.
Arfan Rafiq told this column that he hires help to gather “lumps of rubbish” being dumped in and along the river and the boundary fence separating his land. Old furniture, mattresses and other detritus have been dumped by people who toss it over the fence.
Household waste is also being dumped into a stretch of the Dalgan River running through Mr Rafiq's land.
“In the summer, I plan to get the river dredged to clean it out," he said.
Mr Rafiq is also planning to add more CCTV cameras across the property to catch the culprits in the act.
A query to Mayo County Council in December on the number of fines administered in the Ballyhaunis area for illegal dumping over the past year has not been answered.
Congratulations to Eirin and Ellie Higgins, Esker Pines, who won €630 in the Ballyhaunis GAA 50/50 draw on January 19th on an envelope sold in the club's direct debit.
