West Limerick keeps firm grip on its silver and bronze in Tidy Towns

ADARE, once again this year’s County Winner in the Tidy Towns competition and a silver medal winner for the second year in a row, and they scored just 11 points below this year’s outright winner, Listowel.

But that tantalisingly small gap in points, 328 points as against 339, is the hardest to close, most people involved in the competition agree. 

“It is a big jump. We still have to catch the others up,” Adare’s Tidy Towns chairman, George Stacpoole, said following Monday’s results. There will be some “tweaking” to do in the future, he said, but he declared the Adare result “tremendous”.

“We are still top of the county which is brilliant and we increased our points by seven,” he said.

Their result, he added, was all the more remarkable given the traffic congestion that is now a daily occurrence. But the judges’ report was very fair and very helpful, he said.

Mr Stacpoole however was a bit puzzled as to why they could win a gold medal in 2016 with 318 points and win silver in 2018 with 328 points.

The competition, he noted, was no longer about flower beds and prettiness, and had widened out to include sustainability and biodiversity, ‘and rightly so’. 

“We have this enormous pride in the village of Adare. This is a special village,” he said, in answer to the question what motivates the team, year after year, in the arduous journey to try to reclaim the top prize. (Adare won the competition in 1976.) 

“We believe in it,” chairwoman of Newcastle West Tidy Towns Committee Vicki Nash, said, when asked the same question about motivation. 

Newcastle West was celebrating its seventh bronze medal in a row and added five points to its score this year to reach 310.

“Once you get into the medals at all, it gets harder,” she said. “The higher you get, the harder it is to get extra points. You have to work harder and harder and come up with new ideas and new approaches.”

“Ten flower bed instead of eight isn’t enough. You have to revisit every single category,” she pointed out. 

So they were particularly pleased  to see improvements in five out of the eight judging categories.

Attending the awards ceremony in Dublin was also very helpful, Ms Nash said.

“You definitely learn a lot. You see what is going on in other places. You meet other groups and they tend to be open about what they are doing.”

She was particularly impressed this year by the fact that Carrickmacross had enlisted 400 volunteers in the work.

Other top scorers in West Limerick were Broadford on 310 points, Templeglantine  with 307 points, Glin on 306, Askeaton on 303 and Mountcollins on 300.

Mary Lee, Geary, chairwoman of the Broadford Development Association said they were happy with their result, an increase of four points on last year.

“You have to keep climbing. You have to keep the faith,” she said. 

The local committee has a plan in place to totally upgrade the arboretum in the centre of the village. “That would be a big plus for us if it was finished,”she said.  

“We would be anxious to go after one of the stand-alone awards in the future,” she added.

Dromcollogher meanwhile, topped Category B (Population 201 to 1,000) with 249 marks.