Clonmellon Tidy Towns Newsletter
Winter 2018 Edition

Welcome to the Winter edition of our Tidy Towns Newsletter.

Tidy Towns Report
September was when we got our adjudication report. There are 8 categories that we were judged on. In total we received (227) points. In six of the categories we received 60% of the marks which was very good. All in all we are
very happy but of course there are a couple of areas that we have to work on. See below two samples of the  categories;

Tidiness and Litter Control - 35/90
There was very little litter on our streets apart from the playground as there are no bins in this area we will look to have one put around the playground.  We were a bit disappointed with the marks for this category for the amount of
work that was done by everyone but we can improve on this for next year.

Sustainability- Doing more with less - 7/50
We will look into this as its an area that need huge improvement - if anyone has any suggestions please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  Overall the report was good with useful tips for us to work with. It gives us a
better understanding of what the adjudicator is looking for. We looked at this report as a constructive report where we can learn as we go forward with our plans for the competition and the village and surrounding areas.

Fundraising Throughout The Year

Over the last couple of months we did a lot of fundraising. Our local Day to Day shop held a coffee morning for us and this was a big success raising close to €400

Next we held an Afternoon Tea event in Issacs Well, again this was a great
success all this money went towards new equipment and buying new plants /
flowers, we thank all who supported us in the start up of tidy towns. We raised over €1,000 after expenses.

Virginia Gospel Choir came to our beautiful venue at St. John’s church and gave a fantastic performance in early December. Everyone had a great night with mulled wine and mince pies on offer. Again we raised over €1,000 after
expenses.

New Equipment

We invested in a new lawnmower, a new strimmer, and a new hedge cutter with attachment thanks to your support.  We intend to buy a second lawnmower in the New Year this will then make a big difference to getting the work done a lot quicker and easier.  So to all of you that supported our fundraisers this is greatly appreciated.

After we received our report from the Tidy Towns we needed to know what views the community had about our village and the work we did since we reentered the competition.  We sent in a questionnaire to our local school for the children to bring home.  We kept it small (5) questions in total.

Comments included that the village was a lot cleaner, some would like to see more colour, more plants, new rubbish bins; some did not know we had a tidy towns committee!!! A lot more colour in the village was the key message that stood out to us, so going forward we will aim to have more plants, flower beds, more baskets of flowers in the village.

Contacts with the Co Council.
We had a very progressive meeting with Councillor Paddy Hill recently. Paddy was the only one to reply to our emails and came to meet with us; he gave us a lot of good advice. We sent in a letter to the District Manager with a list of requests that the Co Council can help us with. These are small request and he has sent emails to various people within the council and is awaiting reports back. Going forward we hope that we can make more contacts with the County Council who we know will help us to improve our village for all.

Community Radio

Alan James and Steven McKenna (Clonmellon Men's Shed ) are looking at the possibility of starting a community radio station. Community radio is a popular way of helping communities come together and get involved with and promote
local interest stories and events.
Mainstream radio stations all sound alike and follow the same format, community radio is different, it gives a voice to local people and local stories that would never get the time of day on the commercial stations. There is a growing need for community radio.
A community station based in Clonmellon could technically cover Delvin, Athboy, Kells and Kilskyre. Alan and Steven have met with the manager at Athlone Community radio and also visited Dundalk FM and are planning a public meeting in the new year to decide if there is enough interest to take things to the next step. This is a project that we feel is worthwhile doing and look forward to meeting with interested parties in 2019. If anybody is interested in registering their interest please drop an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit www.clonmellon.com for more information.

Community Garden:
We now have the heavy grass cut and in the next couple of weeks we will start to work on the shape of the garden so if you would like to have some input please contact us on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and share your ideas.
We believe this is a good project for our community this will be a place for the young and old and families to come and meet and to engage with neighbours, friends.

Picnic Area:
This area down on the Kilrush road beside the lodge is a place we started to work on during the summer. We took a lot of rubbish out of the river and we tidy up the trees, we took a lot of ivy of the bridge, the green around the
bridge is a lot cleaner and we hope to have a new picnic table in place for Summer 2019

We had the OPW / board of works out to see if we could get the river flowing again. We got a commitment that they will be back in 2019 to look at the river with the intention to getting the river flowing. We would like to thank them for
their quick response.

Winter work

Towards the end of the year the cleaning of the village still went on, overall we collected about 10/ 12 trailer loads of leaves!!!  Our work is constant and we would like to extend a big thank you to the  business in the village for their efforts to continue the work they started in the summer with their various shopfronts.

This is the start of the festive season and as mentioned above we had a gospel Choir event in St John’s Church.

We wanted to start this season with something nice for our community and of course a fundraiser so we thought that a gospel choir would be nice. We chose St John’s Church as the venue on Saturday 1st and what a show it was.
We had two very specials birthdays to celebrate Eithne who was ( 81 ) and Betty Mooney who was a great age of ( 95 ) we presented them with a flowers and chocolates.

We had a green bookmark made up as a keepsake of the first concert on behalf of tidy towns. As for the concert everyone present agreed it was a lovely way to finished of the weekend after the enjoyable winter market in the
community hall where Santa and Mrs Claus went down a treat with the kids.  Maybe next year we can arrange a full weekend of activities to mark the start of this wonderful time of the year. See you in 2019!! :)