Yesteryears: West Tipperary celebrating after green light given for ambitious plan

This week our YESTERYEARS feature goes back all of 25 years to our edition dated March 14, 1998, in which Eamonn Wynne led with a good news story from Tipperary town.

He wrote: “West Tipperary is celebrating this week, after the ambitious £2.8 million Excel Centre in Tipp town was given the green light by the government. The announcement last weekend that the long-awaited second phase of £650,000 Government funding is to be made available by the Department has been widely welcomed in the town in particular, and throughout the county in general.”

The announcement brought to an end a six-year saga when a local committee purchased the former cinema building in Market Street for £50,000 with the assistance of an interest-free Credit Union loan.
A thrilled Jim O’Shea, Chairman of the management committee, told The Nationalist that he expected the Centre to be completed within 18 months.

In another front page piece we informed readers that both Carrick-on-Suir and Tipperary town were vying for the distinction of being number one in the pecking order for urban renewal status.

The Urban Councils in both towns had been informed that week that the consultants who prepared submissions for each of them would make a recommendation of which town was to get priority.

Yesteryears! Thirty men hospitalised after ammonia leak at plant in Tipperary

Take a look back!

Also on the front page was a piece about Bansha-born Christy Roche being named the 1998 Tipperary Person of the Year.

The 47-year-old jockey was to be presented with an unique piece of bronze, sculptured by Tipperary-born artist Jarlath Daly, the then president of the Tipperary Association at Moran’s Hotel, Dublin.

In 1997 Christy Roche had been crowned Irish champion flat jockey, the seventh time in an illustrious career that he had won the title. Roche had won many classics over the years including an Epsom Derby win on Secreto and three Irish derbys on Assert, St Jovite and Desert King.

The front page photo that week was an interesting one also with five local primary school teachers with over 200 years of teaching experience between them accorded a Mayoral reception at Clonmel Town Hall by then Mayor, Cllr Tommy Norris, himself one of the five. Also honoured were Eileen Moran, Sean Hill, Sean Nyhan and Pat Geary.