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The Clare People
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 You've found the ultimate Fantasy Football game. Take your pick of players plying their trade in the English Premier League and put your knowledge and management skills to the test.
If you aren't already playing the game then you can register at http://fantasy.premierleague.com
Once you have logged in and entered your team, click on the 'Leagues'
link you can find on the right of the page.
Now enter the code 903574-164948 to join the Clare People league. Pick your squad With a budget of £100 million, choose a squad of 15 players made up of: - 2 Goalkeepers
- 5 Defenders
- 5 Midfielders
- 3 Forwards
No more than 3 players can be selected from a single team. Scoring The players in your squad score points based on how they perform in Premier League matches. No matter which team you support you'll soon find yourself cheering on every player who's in your team.
Enjoy the game and spread the word.
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The Clare People
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Meningitis aware
Sir -
I AM writing to say thank you to everyone in Ireland who supported the Meningitis Trust during 2008. It’s only with the help of local communities that we are able to continue our vital work helping to rebuild lives shattered by meningitis.
The Meningitis Trust is a national charity and relies entirely on voluntary donations, which means support from individuals, families, schools, nurseries and businesses is fundamental to its survival.
Meningitis can strike anyone, of any age, at any time. Those who survive can be left with devastating after-effects including loss of hearing and sight, brain damage and, where septicaemia (blood poisoning) has occurred, loss of limbs. These after-effects last a life time and impact all aspects of day-to-day life for the individual as well as their family, friends and colleagues. This time of the year is particularly relevant for talking about meningitis as cases of the disease rise in the winter. The Meningitis Trust urges people to be vigilant of the signs and symptoms and to trust their instincts. Symptoms can include, fever, headache, stiff neck, dislike of bright lights, drowsiness, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and, in some cases but not all, a rash that doesn’t fade under pressure.
For more information, readers can call the Trust’s freephone 24-hour nurse-led helpline on 1800 523 196 or log on to its website www.meningitis-trust.ie. Thank you all once again and best wishes for 2009.
Carole Nealon, General Manager
The Meningitis Trust
Heartless comment
Sir -
THE remarks by local Fianna Fáil TD and 26 County Administration
Defence Minister Willie O’Dea that the threat to manufacturing jobs
at the Dell plant may “involve a certain dislocation” to the Limerick
region must be condemned.
The comments indicated a certain coldness for the fate of the workers
at the Raheen plant. This is a type of side of the mouth speak that is popular with some politicians trying to lessen the impact of bad news and distance themselves from it.
The fact that Willie O’Dea can coldly talk about a “certain dislocation” in regard to the jobs and futures of Limerick workers show how far he and Fianna Fáil are removed from the economic reality of local people. A “certain dislocation” is a painless way of saying that people will lose their jobs, will have to go on the dole and will have to struggle for financial survival. A “certain dislocation” is also a cheap way of saying that mortgage payments will be missed, houses will be repossessed by the banks and children may go hungry and face an uncertain future.
The minister should be ashamed of himself for using such language to describe what for many will be a human tragedy. The irony is that among the many men and women who will lose their jobs will be those who voted for Willie O’Dea.
His words certain dislocation are cold comfort for them at this time in Limerick facing into the new year when fear of the future hangs over them. The minister must do the right thing and withdraw such a heartless comment.
Des Long,
52 Shannon Banks,
Corbally, Limerick
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The Editor
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Desperate times
IT MAY have looked grim when the Government pressed ahead with its ill-advised move to increase the rate of VAT to 21.5 per cent but any hope of a respite for the retail trade in Ennis was finally extinguished when the local town councillors voted to impose a three per cent rates increase for the coming year.
With a number of retail outlets already forced out of business because of the recession and several others on a tenuous lifeline until the new year, a bad situation was made even worse by the town council’s decision to follow up on the rates increase by raising charges in the public car parks. Retailers believe that the 20 per cent increase in parking charges could only have been justified if it was to be spent on additional parking in the town centre.
These increases in rates and parking charges will come on top of an almost doubling of water and waste charges to the local authority during 2009.
It defies logic that the local authority should be so detatched from the genuine concerns of the town’s traders who are already under severe pressure to keep their shop doors open for another year.
Many are relying on a Christmas/New Year reprieve that may not be enough to solve their short term difficulties while others are already planning cutbacks to bring them through what is being forecast as a very tough 2009.
Their situation will not be helped by the level of leakage to the new shopping centres in Limerick and Galway with a recent survey by Crest Retail predicting that three-quarters of all money spent on consumer goods will be going outside the county by 2013. Already it is calculated that €75 million in expenditure on non-grocery shopping is moving out of Ennis every year and 62 per cent of spending on items such as footwear, jewellery and sports goods is going to Limerick.
And the situation could get even worse with approval given to the €250 million Opera shopping centre complex while a €150 million Parkway Valley complex is planned on the Dublin Road as well as major refurbishment to the Arthurs’s Quay shopping centre - not to mention the huge expansion planned for the Coonagh Cross retail complex on the Clare side of the city.
According to the local Chamber of Commerce, Ennis retailers are managing to survive only by strict cost control but with zero inflation and reduced spending power forecast for 2009. There is no room for any further price increases.
The chamber believes that even more local jobs are under serious threat and that retailers are not in a position to plug further holes in council finances over and above the funding they already contribute. They are now under so much pressure that they have asked the local authority to achieve any further savings through efficiencies in its own administration.
And that summarises just how desperate things have become.
Goodbye to all that!
IN REALITY, there is a great deal more in common between the first day of January and the last one of December than there are differences between them. But the slicing of time and our lives into calendar years allows us to impose something of a clean break with the past if we are minded to do so.
It is arguably relatively straightforward for individuals to represent the dawn of a new year as an opportunity to restart their lives - though the volume of lapsed gym memberships and resumed smoking habits as the year goes on suggests that the road to hell is paved with new year’s resolutions as much as everyday good intentions.
It is harder for governments to do so because inconsistency with past policies and practices is automatically represented by a cynical media as evidence of weakness and uncertainty. Nonetheless, if only because Government is composed of individuals, the combination of the pause in political life over an extended Christmas and the arrival of a new year does afford something of a window to change direction.
Most members of the present Government have occupied high public office continuously for more than 11 years. For much of that time, they presided over what was generally accepted to be a fundamental and benign economic transformation of our society. This represents a positive political legacy which the Government is naturally anxious to protect. But that legacy becomes a problem when defending it prevents addressing new realities honestly.
Social partnership - and the cumbersome, consultative, consensual decisionmaking apparatus that went with it - was a tolerable if far from perfect or equitable framework for preserving industrial peace and steering the economy generally in good and stable times. But relying on it now is the equivalent of expecting deep trenches and fixed bayonets to withstand Hitler’s blitzkrieg.
To mix metaphors, for at least a year it has been apparent that the Government has needed to saddle up a different, leaner and sprightlier horse for the tougher course on which we now find ourselves but, so far, it has looked like an old dog that is a prisoner of its old tricks.
The new year gives Government a narrow opportunity to move on from the verbalising, consulting, planning, reporting, delegating and ducking that was rife in 2008. Its biggest challenge in 2009 is to rebuild public confidence in its competence, direction and resolve which can only be done by taking hard decisions that demonstrate grit and urgency.
Let’s hope they seize it.
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Editorial
