Ireland's Eye: What's going on in the old sod this week

A look at news from around Ireland

Emigration Hits GAA

GAA clubs across Carlow are counting the cost of the economic downturn as they struggle to field teams and are forced to consider amalgamating with the opposition.  Mass emigration, alongside retirements, has left the future of clubs around the county in trouble.

Intermediate side Leighlinbridge are just one of the many clubs suffering, having lost eight players from last year’s team, ruling them out of the junior championship.  Club chairman Sean Haughney, is fearful.

“We had two teams for the last 10 years. We are struggling now with one team. At the present time if we lost two or three more players we could be in dire trouble,” he said.
In the past he had the luxury of omitting players who did not show for training. This is not the case now.

“We have just asked players to come up and play. That is how bad the scenario is. Realistically speaking we would not have had a team this year if we hadn’t done that,” he said.

But Leighlinbridge are not alone. Naomh Eoin has a strong player base but will only be fielding two teams instead of the usual three.

Clubs who have competed side by side may now have to consider amalgamating if they are to continue to exist.

Haughney said he is “Leighlinbridge to the backbone,” but concedes his is open-minded about the future of the club.

Carlow Nationalist

Girl Struck by Needle
A YOUNG city girl was rushed to hospital after she fell into a heap of rubbish containing a half-full heroin needle.

Holly Sheehy, just nine years old, was playing in a laneway near her home on the Abbey Lane, King’s Island with friends when she fell off her scooter into a heap of rubbish next to a laneway close to her home.

This contained a used needle containing what doctors confirmed to be heroin. The syringe connected with the tip of her finger.

After realizing this, Holly’s mother Irene rushed her to the infectious diseases clinic at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital where she was kept overnight.

Now, the St, John’s National School student is on a cocktail of five drugs in the morning and the evening, designed to eradicate any threat of HIV and hepatitis B.

Holly has to take these for the next month, and she has to undergo further tests at Crumlin Children’s Hospital in Dublin.

Her mother-of-10 Irene described it as her “worst nightmare,” and called on the council to carry out daily clean-ups of all housing estates to ensure this appalling incident does not happen to any other youngster.

“I am appalled this is going on in our street. I know people do it [take heroin] but I am appalled that these needles are being left lying around. If it did not stick into my child accidentally, another young person could have picked it up,” she said.

“You just don’t know what is going on in your street when you sleep at night.”
Holly says she is struggling to keep the remedies inside, as they are making her sick.

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Nster.com