The tale of 2 café’s

About 30 years ago Rosslare Harbour morphed into Rosslare Europort.  Central to the rebrand was the new terminal at the harbour which won award after award for its design. 2 railway stations rolled into one with walkways to the ships. Integrated services for foot passengers meant that trains and ships ran together.  I remember travelling from Dublin on the 13.30 and transferring to the ship for Le Havre with just a 20 minute stop over. On the other hand arriving in Le Havre meant a shuttle bus to the railway station where you had a full 90 minute wait for the train to St Lazare.

Ferry services to Le Havre are a thing of the past. Rosslare Europort has also lost its sheen. The train no longer draws up at the platform. About 10 years ago it was relocated overnight to a new platform to the rear of a redundant engine shed.  Foot passengers have dropped off as  the focus has moved to cars and road freight.

One causality of the times has been the cafe and bar.  About 20 years ago, I recall watching an Ireland game one afternoon as I waited for the steam train to be turned on the turn table before we came back to town.

Rosslare has ferry links to 4 other ports. One of them is Fishguard.  Fishguard never got the  level of investment from the British government that Rosslare got. Let’s park the legal anomaly about the Fishguard Rosslare Harbour Railway Company. Stena owns the railway station at Fishguard Harbour. While the cafe and bar at Rosslare are a thing of the past, travellers to Rosslare may be interested to know that the cafe on the platform in Fishguard is still going strong. A few weeks ago i had a bite to eat there as I waited for the boat home. For less than a fiver I got a plate of chips with a sausage roll and a cuppa. That was much less than what I’d have paid onboard the ship home.

This is the bit I find interesting. Rosslare has significantly more foot passengers than Fishguard presumably with more money to spend. Yet the café at Rosslare is closed while the one at Fishguard operates.  There’s an opening for someone in the catering business were CIE prepared to offer a realistic lease to re-open the café.  And judging by the price I paid for a simple meal there’s an opportunity for someone to compete with the monopoly that ferries enjoy once the set sail if CIE were prepared to rent out the former café.

Let’s face it, there is no business with a bar. Attitudes to drink have changed. The prospect of BREXIT will eventually mean a return of duty free and the dreaded booze cruises. Who’d invest long term in a bar when the shipping line might possibly undercut you? But food is different. 

CIE asked for a bail out from the state about 4 years ago. Nobody asked them if they were maxing their assets to ensure that all possible revenue streams were contributing to the company. But then senior civil servants in the Department of Finance are rarely found supping tea while waiting for a ferry to Ireland.

Trashed!

Those of you who follow my blog will know I’m big into Tidy Towns. I’m not on my own. Wexford is big into   tidy towns.  In the last few years there’s been a steady improvement in the town’s score, an increase in those joining tidy towns and progress from bronze to silver medal status.

Wexford tidy towns meet up every Saturday morning at 10 AM and Wednesday evening at 6PM. 

Today was no different and we had a good turn out. I spent the morning at the corner of Bride Street and Clifford Terrace weeding and planting on a patch of land beside a derelict house.

Therese and I cleared out weeds and planted geraniums and lilies. We took out a bag and a half of weeds in 90 minutes. So imagine how proud we were to have lifted the black bags onto the back of the council truck. We cracked a few jokes with the council workers and went for a cuppa pleased with what we’d achieved.

So a few hours later when I passed up the street you can imagine how surprised I was when I discovered a black plastic bag sitting on the side of the road, exactly where we’d been working. Had we forgotten a bag of waste? Had we been more effective than we thought?

No, is the short answer. I went over to take a closer look. It seems that by an amazing coincidence  a sack of domestic rubbish had arrived hours after the truck had left.  That’s the innocent explanation.

The cynic may think that someone spotted an opportunity to dump waste and piggy back on the work of volunteers for tidy towns. And the cynic may be right. It isn’t the first time that this has happened and it may be happening more often more recently.

A few weeks ago I was in Zambia. They don’t have bin collections there. It was a frequent occurrence to smell smoke from the burning of rubbish on the side of the street as I walked around Kabwe. Scorches were frequently seen on the side of roads which were often unlit in years as the council simply doesn’t have the money for street lighting and where pavements are as rare as hen’s teeth.

I returned home in the middle of a debate about whether bin charges should be on an annual basis or by the kilogramme.  Rubbish has to be collected. For years we have accepted the principle of the polluter pays. Still some people simply don’t get it.  We can have a town as good or as lousey as what citizens want.

If the polluter doesn’t want to pay, why should I or you? 

Echo of the Sunday Tribune

Local media is something that is fundamental to a functioning and transparent community. So when a local paper closes, the scope to interact with a community is lost.  A free and fair media is central to any society.  One less newspaper means one less perspective on life.  I miss the Sunday Tribune and The Irish Press. Their demise didn’t mean that readership of continuing titles increased. A newspaper says something about it’s readers, it’s a badge and you can tell a lot about a community by the titles they read.

But the loss of a paper takes something away from a community. So when the Wexford Echo suddenly closed it is easy to see why there is a sense of loss in Co Wexford. There was no warning, the termination in publishing was fast and rapid. The Echo group publishes 4 titles, one in each of the 4 districts in the county.  The paper was strong on local sport and the arts. As recently as 5 years ago the echo won a national award as the regional newspaper of the year. The paper has been a breeding ground for many journalists who went on to bigger and better things on the national stage.  So how can this happen?

The mainstay of the group was the Enniscorthy Echo which was the dominant title in what was for a long time Co Wexford’s second town.  Enniscorthy’s economy has been in decline for sometime. Shops are closing and the main street has seen footfall decrease.  Where were Enniscorthy’s political representatives down through the years when all this was going on? Enniscorthy is now reaping a bitter harvest of political neglect by Fianna Fail for decades.  Less business in the town means less ads. Advertising is crucial to any newspaper. Readership is important too but freesheets prove that cover price is not absolutely essential to the mix.

Newspaper readership is in decline as punters look to online and more immediate sources for their news. Put the 2 factors together and you get the picture of what has been going on in the background. The group was sold by a local family to the Examiner group from Cork in the early part of the decade in a multi-million deal.  

It’s over 2 weeks since the paper shut up shop. There were early indications that another buyer may be interested in purchasing the 4 titles within the county and to re-launch the publications.  Where that suggestion is at the minute is top secret.

While there are hopes to revive the titles, it is certain that any return will be under a different cost structure.  It will remain to be seen as to how a revived Echo newspaper group can be put together working on the new  business realities in the media. I’ll declare an interest. I write a column for a freesheet which is owned by the rival stable the People Group Newspapers.  But I believe there is room there for 2 groups in Co Wexford.  

In the round newspapers are fair to all involved in politics. If a politician feels hard done by one week, they do balance it in time.  I’ve found the journalists I’ve dealt with down through the years to be honest, hard working and well briefed with often a good sense of humour thrown in!  A newspaper gives all its readers one singular set of facts that readers can either accept or reject communally. At a time of fake news and instant spin this commodity is becoming rare.
Fingers crossed the group can be revived for them and their reader's sake.

Keep the spirit

I’ve never done anything as difficult before in my life, nor have I ever done anything as ultimately rewarding. It’s one thing to see a problem from a distance, it’s another to see it close up.

Two weeks in Zambia has been both an eye opener and a back breaker. Eye opening to how a people can be affected by an environmental, social and a chronic disease. Eye opening in the realisation that there are no easy fixes to the deep problems that thwart Africa. Back breaking in enduring the physical work to build classrooms using pick axes, shovels and bare hands. Back breaking in the run in to raise funds to get there and back. The gardening work was enjoyable. What can be better than tending soil and growing veg??

Sables Nua is a shelter and primary school for homeless children on the edge of Kabwe.  You can walk in 20 minutes from its gate down the road to the pit where one of the earliest hominoid fossils was discovered almost 90 years ago. About 10 miles past the pit stands the bush school at Kangombe. Drive off the tarmac, onto the dirt track and turn right onto a trail past the medical centre. You’ll never complain about potholes on Irish roads after you’ve driven this route.  On the second day that we were there, a tyre on the 4X4 burst as we transported a patient to the hospice. Welcome to the real world.

One of the children that I met on my first day n Sables Nua was a boy called Andrew. Andrew was from Malawi.  When Andrew’s father discovered that he had infected Andrew’s mother with HIV AIDs, he sent them packing. Andrews mother took him to Zambia where she sought treatment. There is no central data base for medical records in this part of Zambia. Andrew’s mother kept her record in a book. In February Andrew’s mother disappeared. She told Andrew that she would be away at the clinic but would be back soon. And that was the last he’d heard of her.

Andrew and his mother survived by sheltering under a stall in the fish market. The smell of rotting fish acts as a magnet to rats. After a few days when his mother didn’t return, concerned stall holders brought Andrew to Sables where I met him. They brought Andrew and his few belongings with him to Sables Nua. His mother's book and a few contact numbers were inside his bag.  Attempts to track down relatives through the phone numbers ran into the ground/ Months later Andrew still asked for his mother and worried that she would never find him. Attempts to track her down proved fruitless.   It was reckoned that his mother wanted to spare him the ignominy of finding her dead and had walked into the bush where she would inevitably die.

I asked what was Andrew’s legal position as a foreign national whose father wasn’t interested in him. What would become of him? The shelter had no legal grounds to take care of him. Nothing existed on paper.

Women in Africa are second class citizens, but a woman with HIV AIDS is even lower again.  So many times, I’ve been told that when a woman becomes infected with HIV, her husband solves the problem by kicking her out.. Oblivious to the reality that he infected her in the first case, off he goes to form another relationship where he will in turn infect another woman.

All the presumptions, that we Europeans make, go out the window. On a visit to one market I took a picture of the group with the stalls in the background. Hearing voices of stall holders raised around me I asked the social worker who accompanied us, what had I done wrong? Had their privacy been breached? The answer was that there was nothing wrong. They simply wanted to have their picture taken with me!

Each of us saw something different in Zambia. For me it was the echoes of stories that my own father told me about teaching in rural schools in 1940’s Ireland.  The principal of the bush school addressed the school and the Irish students and translated a saying from Bemba. He was thrilled that his school was getting rebuilt and valued the work that was being done and the determination to see the job through. The saying goes “Keep the Spirit”.

Pretty sound advice to an Irishman.  We Irish need reminding of the people we once were and where we’ve come from.  For many who set out on the road to Zambia there was the intention of doing something positive and leaving that behind us.  But here was a rural principal, giving us sound and worthwhile advice to take home with us. If we did nothing else than to take on board that saying then the trip was worthwhile.

But before I finish off, remember Andrew? Well 2 days before we left, out of the blue Sables Nua got a phone call from a hospital in Lusaka. It was Andrew’s mother. She had been confined since February but had recovered enough to be discharged. She returned to collect Andrew. But before she left she signed an order committing Andrew to Sables Nua in the event of her death.  Sadly her HIV condition is progressive and terminal. But before she dies, she loved Andrew enough to make sure that he could have an education and a future she never had.  He will not have to live out his life wondering whether the only parent to care for him ever loved him.  Andrew has that certainty. It’s not the Hollywood ending that we westerners like to expect but it’s an ending that is better than what many more cynical like me had feared.