The Limerick Blogger: latest Limerick news and Limerick events

Its pretty easy to get lost in O’Malley park, esecially if you are not from the area.

Two gunmen found this out the hard way when they went looking for an individual and could not find them.

The two men, armed with handguns entered a house in the estate at 1845 hrs yesterday and confronted an occupant in the house. They asked for a person by name and the occupant told them that he was not in the house.

The two men went to another house and did the same thing, and getting the same result, asking for a person by name and being told that they were not there.

They then went back to the first house and fired three shots. Two shots went into the house but the person who was there escaped injury.

Meanwhile, a woman returned home from work discovered that her windows had been shot at.

The shooting at this house occoured between 0900 and 1730 hrs while the woman was at work. Gardai believe that either a shotgun or a pellet gun was used in this incident.

It is not known whether these shootings are related to “the feud.”

A man who was convicted of making nuisance phone calls to solicitor Ted McCarthy and his mother has been fined €1,200 and given a suspended sentence.

Christopher Carroll (48) with an address at Hyde Road, Prospect in Limerick received the sentence Judge Leo Malone.

The court had previously been told that the threatening and abusive calls were made in the early hours of May 25th. Mr. McCarthy’s elderly mother got an earful too after she received some calls on the same date.

Defence solicitor David Brophy had told the court that the calls were made not long after Carroll had received a bill from Mr. McCarthy in relation to another legal matter. He also told the court that his client was a self-confessed alcoholic and had “broken out” in the days leading up to the incident.

“This was drunken talk, and my client had no influence over that family at all” Mr. Brophy told the court.

Judge Malone fined Carroll €1,200 for the calls made to Mr McCarthy and gave him a suspended sentence of four months for the calls to his mother.

Join us again when David Brophy sends out his bill…

Gary Campion, the man accused of the murder of Fat Frankie Ryan, will be the subject of a bail application in the High Court on Tuesday, it was revealed Tuesday in Limerick District Court by his solicitor Chris Lynch.

Campion, (23) with an address in Pineview Gardens, Moyross, will be before the district court again on October 4th.

Source : Limerick Leader.

Banta Global Turnkey, which employs 700 people in Raheen in Limerick, is to shed 200 of its 350 staff in Cork city as it moves a part of it’s business to the Czech Republic.

The company has two major customers, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, and it is the Hewlet Packard business which is being moved east.

The staff in Cork were informed of the move at 1400 hrs on Wednesday.

The 700 jobs in Limerick will be unaffected by this move by the company, however it is looking like a continuing trend for Banta in Ireland. In 2003 they closed down their plant in Dublin costing 65 jobs when it moved its operations to Cork and Limerick.

Banta is a major supplier to Dell Computers in Limerick and has workers both in it’s own plant and also on-site on Dell’s campus.

So the Limerick Jobs at Banta might be safe for now, but how long will that last? All eyes will be on what Dell do next August.

The 400 Polish employees working in Dell’s Limerick factories will be facilitated should they wish to go back to Poland and work in Dell’s new plant at Lodz.

The Polish plant is due to open for production in Autumn of 2007.

It is not believed that there will be any financial incentives for these Poles to take up these opportunities, and it is also not clear if they will continue to receive the same wage as they do in Ireland.

Information sessions will take place for those who are interested in moving.

source Unison.ie

One of the twelve men, dubbed the Twelve Apostles, involved in “helping Bertie Ahern out” with the court costs surrounding his separation from his wife in 1993 is a Limerickman.

Owner of numerous Dublin pubs and a shareholder in Sunderland Football Club, Charlie Chawke, from Adare, County Limerick, was named as one of 12 people who donated between IR£2,500 and IR£5,000 to the whiparound to pay the Taoseach’s legal bills. The entire list can be found here.

And what good is an Apostle, without a Gospel to name after him.

Heres a brief summary of the Gospel according to Charlie, lifted in part, from today’s Irish Independent.

Whilst having a few jars in one of Chawke’s pubs, The Goat Inn, Chawke and his friends were gossiping about poor Bertie and how the court proceedings connected with his separation from his wife Miriam had left him in the poor house. The old light bill needed to be paid, and then there was those solicitors bills. (We didn’t have RateYourSolicitor.com in those days you see, so shopping around for a good affordable solicitor was harder for people in them days that it is for the young pups now), And the man in charge of the finances of the country was losing control of his own finances.

Indeed, that would have been very embarrasing for a Minister for Finance to be broke, and Chawke and his friends didn’t want to see this happen.

So they decided to have a whip around amongst themselves to raise some funds for their financially strapped friend.

But, the Gospel According to Charlie, says that Bertie initially refused to accept the money totaling €50,000 by today’s standards.

He eventually did accept the money on the condition that it was to be a loan, and destined to be paid back with interest, according to Chawke. This hasn’t happened yet. In an interview with RTE’s Brian Dobson, Mr. Ahern admitted that he hasn’t even started to repay his “debt fo honour”

Reading from the Gospel, The Independent reports that neither Chawke or his friends need the money back or want it back. Why would thay? Most of them ended up in plum Government or semi-state positions during the lifetime of this government.

“There was some talk that the Taoseach could pay the money back after he retired if he wished.” proclaimed Charlie.

A house located in a RESPOND run scheme in Thomondgate was completely destroyed by fire over the weekend, and Gardai believe it was started maliciously.

The fire brigade received the call at 2057 hrs on Saturday evening and one unit of the brigade took an hour to extinguish the fire.

The family who lived in the house for the past ten years, were on holiday in the UK at the time the fire was started, and are now being accomodated elsewhere as the house is completely destroyed.

This is the second house in the Quarry Road scheme which has suffered this fate. A previous incident involving another house was brought up when Limerick City Council’s Houseing SPC gave RESPOND a verbal kicking over its management of their schemes in Limerick.

RESPOND’s responce to the Committee was to take its ball and go back home to Dublin.

Speaking to the Limerick Chronicle, RESPOND’s Managing Director, Patrick Cogan said that it was up to Limerick City Council and the Gardai to provide security for RESPOND tennants at the Quarry Road scheme. “RESPOND residents are not responsible for the serious anti-social behaviour and criminal damage which is prevelent in the Quarry Road area.

Limerick’s outskirts is to get yet another bus lant to nowhere after Limerick County Council approved a €900k “improvement” project for the Ennis Road.

The plan will involve replacing one of the lanes of traffic with a bus lane that will, like the one in Raheen, end at the city’s boundary.

The reason these bus lanes to nowhere are being built is because the good folks of the city council are unwilling to continue them into the city centre. Both the Ennis Road and Ballinacurra Road pass in front of houses where residents park their cars on the street.

There is a fear amongst County Councillors that a third of the money being allocated to build this bus lane, will be lost if progress is not made by year’s end. The Department of Transport has allocated €300k to the project.

So we can expect two lanes of traffic crammed into one on the Ennis Road by this time next year, and it won’t be much better for bus users. Once they reach the city boundary, they will be joining all that traffic as the bus lane comes to an abrupt end.

The remaining 260 jobs at Castlemahon’s poultry plant are to be lost as the plant’s owners wind the company up.

After failed attempts to sell the plant as a going concern,, and after seeing €12m of its money going down the tubes, The O’Kane Group, based in County Antrim and who are owners of the Castlemahon plant, applied to the High Court to have a liquidator appointed.

Keiran Wallace of KPMG has been appointed liquidator.

Not only did the plant provide direct employment for its 260 staff, but it was also a main source of income for 150 farms who supplied chicks and eggs to the plant for processing.

The Evening Herald carried the report today that a woman has been raped in the Trinity Rooms nightclub.

The rape is understood to have taken place between 0100 and 0200 hrs this morning (Tuesday) in the toilets in the club.

Emergency services treated her at the scene and brought her to the Mid-West regional hospital where she received further treatment.

Gardai sealed off the area in preparation of a forensic examination. They are examining CCTV footage from both inside and outside the Michael Street club.