FEBRUARY
SECOND STORM
IN A WEEK
In the second week of February people in Sligo were bracing themselves for the second storm in a week to hit the county. Storm Dennis was due to arrive at the weekend just as the county was starting to recover from Storm Ciara which had caused widespread disruption throughout the county, mainly due to flooding.
ELECTION COUNT
The general election brought disruption of a different kind, with just two of the four outgoing TDs in the Sligo-Leitrim constitency being returned. One of the two not going back to the Dail was Fine Gael’s Tony McLoughlin who retired, however the party managed to hold that seat. But Fianna Fail lost one of its two seats when Ballymote-based TD Eamon Scanlon failed to be reelected.
The election count, which was held at the Sligo Park Hotel, took a total of 28 hours to complete across Sunday and Monday.
The big success story was Sinn Féin’s Martin Kenny, who topped the poll and was elected on the Sunday. The other big story was the election of Marian Harkin, who had previously been a TD but then served for a number of years as an MEP. She was elected on Monday night along with outgoing Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry and Fine
Gael’s Frank Feighan, who was standing for the first time in the constituency, having previoulsy been a TD in Roscommon.
SAD DEATH OF
MAN, 21, IN CRASH
A crash on the N4 Sligo to Dublin road between Collooney and Castlebaldwin, which involved a lorry and a car, resulted in the death of the driver of the car, 21-year-old Hasib Allakarami, from Carrickon-Shannon. He was studying at IT Sligo and was due to be married in the summer.
Tributes were paid to the late John Sherlock, a former cathaoirleach of Sligo County Council, who passed away peacefully at North West
Hospice. He was first elected to
Sligo County Council in 1991 and represented the Ballymote area. LIVING IN QUARANTINE AREA IN VIETNAM
Little did anyone here know what was facing us when the Sligo Weekender reported on February 20 how Sligo teacher Daniel McGlynn was living in Hanoi in Vietnam
“just miles from the world’s largest coronavirus quarantine area outside China”. He told the Sligo Weekender
that he didn’t know when he would be back to work and that people were “living amid uncertainty”. A week after the election Sinn Fein councillor Chris MacManus, who had withdrawn from the general election race, incredibly found himself in line to become an MEP as a replacement for his Sinn Féin colleague Matt Carty who was giving up his European seat after being elected as a TD.
Cllr MacManus was number six on the substitute list of Matt Carty but came into contention because the first four on the list were all elected as TDs and the party’s fifth choice gave birth just days before the election.
It was announced that Indie rock band Kaiser Chiefs would be part of the line-up for the first Wild Roots Festival, which was to take place in Hazelwood from August 14 to 16, but which, like much else this year, eventually had to be postponed until next summer.