This must Stop: MINISTER FOR STATE Brian Hayes, TD visited Castleisland on Thursday afternoon as part of his nationwide, flooding information gathering tour. Pictured with the minister at Tullig – one of the worst hit areas of the town – are front from left: Cllr. Bobby O’Connell; Arthur Spring, TD; Brendan Griffin, TD; Minister Brian Hayes, TD; Jerry Lenihan, Kerry County Council Area Supervisor and Tony Donnelly, Fine Gael constituency co-ordinator. Back row: Local resident, Mary Brosnan and her son, Mike, Michael Collins, OPW; Graham Spring and Castleisland Area Engineer, Brendan Mulhern. ©Photographs: John Reidy / www.mainevalleypost.com
Flooding in the Castleisland area has always been a bit of a flash-in-the-pan and hit-and-miss at most. Now people here are beginning to talk with a greater frequency of global warming and climate change. There are programmes of a futuristic, speculative nature being aired and made on the topic and they don’t make pleasant viewing.
In terms of a national scale, Castleisland is doing grand in that we don’t get the worst of anything here. However, we did get a fright on Friday morning, January 24 as a vista we have only ever seen on television did a live performance on our roads and streets here.
The Last Word
There were very few reports of the floodwaters getting into houses or business premises here but we got an inkling of how helpless we are when nature decides to teach us a lesson.
Bad and all as that is, it pales when you hear people talking about the state of the cemetery where the remains of their loved ones rest in peace. “That’s the last word,’ and ‘This should be made a priority,” are some of the comments made by locals who have family and loved ones lying there.
Distressing Circumstances
In that too, Castleisland is lucky that it’s not going to take millions of Euro to sort our problems. But for the flooding in Kilbanivane we would, almost all, have forgotten the events of January 24th.
The flooding of the cemetery there is not only a recent occurrence. It has happened before in equally distressing circumstances for the families of people being buried there.
The fact that Minister Hayes, the OPW and Kerry County Council representatives agree that a ‘Small Funds” programme will sort out the problems here surely indicates that the issues here are ‘solvable’ and in the immediate future at that.
Phone Call
It was a phone call from local woman, Fiona Roche that prompted me to go and look at the situation in Kilbanivane those couple of weeks ago. I went and took a photograph and posted it here on the site. Now, a couple of short weeks later it’s been on most of the national, daily papers. The issue made the 6 O’Clock News on RTÉ 1 and later on TG4 on Wednesday evening and see www.thejournal.ie today. Now a ministerial visit, obviously influenced by representations from local Cllr. Bobby O’Connell and we hope we’ve seen the last of a situation too distressing for many people to even talk about.
