A pile of regional news­pa­pers landed on my table this week for my slot on the Break­fast with Hec­tor Show on RTE2FM and I don’t think there’ll be as big a story this year as the fly infes­ta­tion which last week forced hun­dreds from their homes in the Tralee area. Mer­ci­ful hour, that is one Medium-Sized Town, Fairly Big Story…

Fly infes­ta­tion causes havoc in Tralee

An extra­or­di­nary story in the Ker­ry­man this week reads like some­thing straight out of a dodgy straight-to-DVD hor­ror movie. Busi­nesses and home­own­ers in Tralee have been dri­ven to dis­trac­tion for the past week fol­low­ing an infes­ta­tion of flies in the town that has been linked to recent works at Kerry’s main dump.

A bad buzz for the peo­ple of Tralee and a town whose name not even Kerry peo­ple can pronounce

Since last Wednes­day Tralee has been inun­dated by mil­lions of flies with infes­ta­tions forc­ing some busi­nesses to close and even lead­ing to short­ages of fly killer and other bug sprays across the entire town.

Local busi­nesses are blam­ing the plague of flies on Kerry County Coun­cil and works the author­ity car­ried out last week at the Muing­namin­nane land­fill site some nine miles to the north east of Tralee.

These claims have been denied by Kerry County Coun­cil who say that while large num­bers of flies were acci­den­tally released from the dump, the prob­lem was con­fined to the local area and didn’t spread as far as Tralee. Accord­ing to the coun­cil any flies that were found in Tralee were likely the result of unsea­son­ably warm weather.

Swarms of flies began appear­ing in Tralee on Tues­day evening last but the prob­lem began to take on epic pro­por­tions on Wednes­day when huge num­bers of flies began appear­ing in homes and busi­nesses in Tralee town and its sur­round­ing areas.

While homes were badly hit the worst affected were bars, restau­rants and other food busi­nesses. At least three restau­rants in Tralee Town Cen­tre were actu­ally forced to close their doors, dump food stocks and have their premises fumi­gated by pest controllers.

Up to 40 homes in the area around Muing­namin­nane site were affected with house­hold­ers forced to leave their homes as they strug­gled to cope with the flies.

Works at one of the pits in the land­fill dis­turbed a huge num­ber of flies and it’s thought that pre­vail­ing winds then blew the swarm towards Tralee and Bal­ly­ma­cel­lig­ott with sub­se­quent warm weather com­pound­ing the sit­u­a­tion by increas­ing the flies breed­ing rate. The Coun­cil said that the prob­lem has been largely resolved by a return to colder weather and that extra insec­ti­cide is being used at Muing­namin­nane to avoid a repeat of the problem.

Dan Mul­vi­hill of Ball­y­seedy Gar­den Cen­tre was one of those affected for sev­eral days. “We were hit very badly. It was hor­ren­dous at times. We had to cover all the food and I actu­ally had to go out and spend €400 on an elec­tric fly killer. We had has­sle for about four days. Peo­ple were com­ing in, order­ing, see­ing the flies and leav­ing. Sales were def­i­nitely affected,” he said.

“Thank­fully the prob­lem has now been fully rec­ti­fied, all the flies are gone and every­thing is com­pletely back to nor­mal,” said Mr Mulvihill.

Twit­ter and hot choco­late help save new­born foal at County Lim­er­ick farm

One of the best gags at Jerry Seinfeld’s recent Dublin gig was his stance on Twit­ter. He said birds tweets, trans­lated, would be ‘sex, worms’ and that most human tweets are about the same thing… How­ever, there’s no deny­ing that Twit­ter is tak­ing over the world and one tweet helped save the life of a new­born foal in County Limerick.

The Lim­er­ick Leader reports that Ger Whelan’s draught mare foaled on his farm in Bruff on Fri­day last. Every­thing went fine until Ger noticed the colt wasn’t suck­ling from his mother.

Neigh joke, choco­late saved this foal

The farmer found that only one of her two teats was work­ing. How­ever, there was very lit­tle milk being pro­duced from the one teat and the foal’s life was in danger.

In years gone by farm­ers would ring their neigh­bours to see if they had any beestings or colostrum for calves or foals. Instead, Ger thought of Twitter.

Not being a tweeter him­self, he got in touch with the Irish Horse Wel­fare Trust and they sent out a tweet: “FOSTER MARE REQ URG 4 large Draught colt foal. Mare alive but no milk. LIMERICK dis­tance no object: Ger Whe­lan 086…”

It was retweeted over 50 times includ­ing by ani­mal lovers in Eng­land. While no fos­ter mare was forth­com­ing Ger said he got lots of phone calls with advice. And one of those calls with some unusual advice helped to save the day.

“There are dif­fer­ent things you can do to help bring the milk down in the mare for the foal. One of them is to put cocoa pow­der, the same as drink­ing choco­late, in to the mare’s feed.

“A grain of that in to the mare’s feed and that helps her to bring on milk,” said Ger, who in his early for­ties. Once the milk increased in the one teat the foal started suck­ling and now is thriv­ing, says Ger. “The two of them are fly­ing it now,” said Ger.

Ital­ian ‘Oscar’ for Meath man Mickey Brunnock

The Meath Chron­i­cle proudly reports that Kells-native musi­cian Michael Brun­nock has won in the Best Orig­i­nal Song cat­e­gory at this year’s David di Donatello awards cer­e­mony, the Ital­ian equiv­a­lent of the Acad­emy Awards.

New York-based Brun­nock, along with David Byrne and Will Old­ham, was nom­i­nated for ‘If It Falls, it Falls’, one of the songs from the sound­track of the new movie ‘This Must be the Place’, star­ring Sean Penn and Frances McDormand.

Ex-Talking Heads singer Byrne cast Brun­nock to sing the role of an Irish musi­cian on the brink of suc­cess whose voice guides Sean Penn through an emo­tional jour­ney of self-discovery in ‘This Must Be the Place’.

The score by Byrne, with lyrics by Will Old­ham, called for a dis­tinc­tive vocal­ist, and Brun­nock was dis­cov­ered by Byrne’s man­age­ment while search­ing for Irish singer/songwriters on the internet.

No such thing as a free lunch for Craigavon Councillors

Craigavon Council’s new pol­icy of not pro­vid­ing food before meet­ings has led to com­plaints from coun­cil­lors from other dis­tricts, reports the Lur­gan Mail.

It hap­pened at a meet­ing of the Vol­un­tary Tran­si­tional Com­mit­tee (VTC) — designed to unite Armagh Ban­bridge and Craigavon Coun­cils — which was held in Craigavon Civic Centre.

And it left Ban­bridge coun­cil mem­ber John Hanna — who is dia­betic — strug­gling until the meet­ing broke up at 8pm and he rushed home to Scarva for a late meal.

He said: “Our meet­ings start at 6pm, with many mem­bers hav­ing to go straight from their work. They don’t expect a five-course meal, but some­thing to tide them over. All we got at Craigavon was tea and a bis­cuit and we under­stand it was pro­vided by Sinn Fein mem­bers after Craigavon recently passed a ‘no more enter­tain­ing’ motion.

“I wasn’t told any­thing about it — oth­er­wise, I’d have eaten before I went. Frankly, it seems a bit mean. They’re not sav­ing the ratepay­ers much money and I sus­pect the ratepay­ers would feel highly embar­rassed that their coun­cil isn’t even pro­vid­ing sand­wiches for their guests.”

For­mer Armagh Mayor Jim Speers said that Armagh and Ban­bridge pro­vided ade­quate nour­ish­ment for the meetings.

The ‘no enter­tain­ing’ motion was passed by Craigavon Coun­cil last month.

Alder­man Arnold Hatch sais the coun­cil now realises the move is unwork­able and embarrassing.

“We did shoot our­selves in the foot in the heat of a debate aimed at sav­ing money. Now it looks as if we’ll have to save face.”

Wrong Way Steam train leaves par­ents fuming!

The West­meath Topic has a great yarn on the steam train that went the wrong way this week. Paul O’Donovan writes “What was meant to be an enjoy­able fam­ily day out on a steam train excur­sion turned to chaos, frus­tra­tion and annoy­ance for many fam­i­lies who boarded the steam train last Sat­ur­day afternoon.

How­ever, things didn’t quite work out and the jour­ney the train under­took was a dif­fer­ent one entirely and left large groups of fam­i­lies annoyed and frus­trated. The steam train was to make a straight­for­ward jour­ney to Long­ford and back. How­ever, due to a num­ber of prob­lems the train didn’t arrive in Mullingar on time, so instead of going in the direc­tion of Long­ford, the train went in the oppo­site direc­tion – to Kil­lu­can! – a town with a closed rail­way sta­tion so nobody was allowed off the train, there was no refresh­ments on board and the chil­dren grew frustrated.”

A pas­sen­ger, who did not wish to be named, said rel­a­tives had dri­ven out the Long­ford Road to wave at their grand­chil­dren on board the train, and were left wait­ing for an hour. Thank­fully there was a happy end­ing and the peo­ple behind the train trip have offered to com­pen­sate all on board.

Lim­er­ick activist cheesed off at pizza deliv­ery firm

The Lim­er­ick Leader reports that a NORTHSIDE com­mu­nity activist has vowed never to use a city pizza firm again after claim­ing it refused to deliver to his home in Delmege Park.

Christy Duhig says when his 18-year-old daugh­ter Kelsey attempted to order a take-away from a national chain, based in Henry Street, she was told that she would have to walk to 15 min­utes to Watch House Cross at the entrance of Moyross.

He believes the national take-away com­pany, which has more than 80 branches nation­wide, is dis­crim­i­nat­ing against peo­ple from Limerick’s regen­er­a­tion areas.

Busi­ness­man Mr Duhig, who serves on the Moy­ross Res­i­dents Forum, says he was told that the firm’s pol­icy is not to deliver to Moy­ross after one of its dri­vers had the rear wind­screen on his car smashed while mak­ing a deliv­ery to Moyross.

This stance was later con­firmed by the com­pany when the Lim­er­ick Leader made contact.

Mr Duhig says both he and his teenage daugh­ter have been left “dis­il­lu­sioned” by the experience.

“The fact is, we are being stig­ma­tised. This defeats the pur­pose of home deliv­ery. I would not be using them again, and I have advised my daugh­ter not to use them either,” he added.

For­tu­nately, another take-away com­pany in the city was happy to deliver to Delmege Park.