February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Patrick Markey
A mother and daughter are currently being questioned at Henry Street garda station in connection with a recent £1.2 million cannabis seizure.
The Limerick Post reports that the packages, tightly packed in brown adhesive wrapping and weighing 50 kilos, were discovered in the trunk of the car the women were driving when they were stopped by the plainclothes drug squad.
Garda believe the two were part of the same gang hit earlier when a seizure of £20,000 worth of varied drugs as well as two guns were captured.
Det. Sgt. Heelan confirmed that two women in custody, aged 29 and 47. The drugs were destined for distribution in Limerick city, they said.
"They were stopped in traffic when we approached them and identified ourselves, and basically they had nowhere else to go," Heelan said.
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Eight into nine
The population of Muckanagh, Co. Mayo, shot up by over 12 percent in just one night recently.
Muckanagh, a small village with a population of just eight, became a village with nine inhabitants after the only woman resident gave birth to the first child born there in 54 years, the Derry Journal reported.
After Alex Sweeney was born recently, his mother Sharon decided to track down how many years it had been since the village added to its census, and found Eileen Tolan was born in December 1944.
The village had a population of 70 in the 1950s, but had been hard hit by emigration, the paper reported.
Biker paramedics
Car crash victims in Galway could be receiving speedy assistance soon in the form of some biker doctors if a local health board has its way.
The Galway Advertiser reports that the Western Health Board has proposed a plan for a responder motorcycle unit to be set up in Galway ambulance base. The base is expected to up and running by early next year.
The cost of equipping the unit is about £15,000 and, like ambulances, will be manned by a paramedic.
"This unit will greatly improve response times to emergencies in the difficult Galway traffic gridlock, currently causing many problems for the ambulance service and emergency response," said William Moran, acting CEO of the board.
Use your hands, boy!
A leading soccer coach in Mayo has complained that the growing number of cases where young soccer plays are being discouraged from playing the game by teachers involved in Gaelic football training.
The Western People paper reported that a soccer club manager who asked not to be named had said: "In some cases there has been some level of victimization after the players decided to play soccer." Those players are being asked instead to play with their hands and their feet, i.e.: to play only the Gaelic game.
One Under-14 team coach said that his soccer team had been decimated after half his players had been told not to play the Anglicized game.
Locked down
A bizarre incident at an Ennis Garda station recently lent new meaning to the term springing a prisoner to freedom.
According to the Clare Champion, a prisoner who was due to appear before a Ennis judge on a remand hearing failed to make an appearance, despite the fact that he was safely locked up in a nearby Garda station.
In fact, it appears the prisoner was a little too secure. A spring had broken on his cell door and his room could not be opened. The fire brigade were called to help out and the prisoner was released 20 minutes later, a little late for the judge, who had already called it a day.
Garda blamed the prisoner for breaking the door by kicking it throughout the night. He was later released on bail.