Athy Tidy Towns Committee

The recently announced Tidy Town competition results for this year show that Athy has made substantial gains in its overall marks and elicited from the adjudicator the welcome comment ‘Athy is blessed with many wonderful amenities’. Our town has been involved in the Tidy Towns competition for the past 24 years and this year’s results, so far as I know, gave us the highest marks achieved to date. It’s a result which reflects the public’s greater awareness of our surroundings and the need to keep our town as litter free as possible. The local Municipal District Council, funded by local businesses and tax payers, has statutory responsibility for street cleaning. Their work in that regard is hugely helped by the activities of the volunteers who make up the local Tidy Towns Committee. That committee, headed up by Ger Kelly, was established the same year Athy first entered the nationwide Tidy Towns competition. The first chairman of the committee was the late Noel Scully and Ger Kelly took over from Noel many years ago. You will have seen the volunteer workers cleaning and tidying different areas of Athy, particularly during the summer months. They usually meet at Emily Square at 6pm on Fridays during the period March to September and sometimes twice a week, before setting off with brushes, shovels and bags to begin their voluntary work on behalf of the local community. The Tidy Towns volunteers are the unsung heroes of our town and are fully deserving of our praise and thanks for the generous and time-consuming role they play in our community. With Ger Kelly are Patricia Berry, Martina Donnelly, Hilary May, Deirdre Germaine, Bill Lawler, Jim Fitzpatrick, Brendan Moloney, Brian Fitzpatrick, Joe Mullaniff and Geraldine Murphy. This year’s Tidy Towns adjudicator was full of praise for Athy’s efforts, but expressed some disappointment at the amount of litter found in the People’s Park. The park, opened sometime in the middle of the 19th century and gifted to the people of Athy by the Duke of Leinster, is endowed with many splendid mature trees. It is a wonderful space on which Kildare County Council, with the assistance of a government grant, recently spent considerable funds to improve footpaths and seating. It is unfortunate that the opportunity was not taken at the same time to supply the children’s playground with suitable fencing so as to deter adults from using the children’s play equipment. I was particularly interested in the adjudicator’s remarks regarding the use of a community notice board in the town. This was a subject I raised in an Eye on the Past earlier this year as I felt there was a pressing need for community notice boards to be provided in the town. There was no immediate response by the Municipal Council to my suggestion, but strangely the one notice board which was located in Emily Square was removed, presumably by the local authority. Since then it has been brought to my attention by several persons that local families are not aware of events in the town and so miss the opportunity of being involved. Maybe the Municipal Councillors, successors to the Urban District Councillors of old, will consider the desirability, indeed the necessity, of providing a community notice board in the centre of the town? Ger Kelly, chairman of the Tidy Towns Committee, tells me that a noticeable worrying trend is the increase in illegal dumping, mainly on the outskirts of the town. In addition, the refuse bins in and around the town are often used by some individuals to dispose of household rubbish. All of this is a direct result of the Council’s decision some years not to provide bin collection services for households as a public utility service. I felt then, and I still do, that Kildare County Council’s decision in that regard was a short sighted one which would lead to the dumping problems we are now experiencing. The adjudicator’s comments in relation to Edmund Rice Square, which I look out on every day, brought home to me that as locals we need to look at our town through visitor’s eyes. The report noted ‘Duke Street car park was disappointing, especially since it is in a gorgeous location, with views of the castle and the river. The planters are too high to be easily watered and managed. They were not being managed and brings a dilapidated look to the area which is a shame.’ Overall the adjudicator’s report was a good report for Athy and ended with the references to the ‘great social capital in Athy’ and the town’s ‘many beautiful aspects such as the river, canal and many heritage buildings.’