If you’re out and about visiting Thurles in the coming days; enjoying our summer spell of warm sunshine, please do be sure and take a walk down to the rear of Thurles Shopping Centre. There you’ll find a ‘must see’ wildflower garden, reminiscent of a showcase exhibit at “Bloom” in the Phoenix Park, Dublin.
Congratulations to the Management of Thurles Shopping Centre for not just supporting this wonderful example of biodiversity and urban beauty, but also in providing a new seating area, together with an appropriately sized Litter Bin to handle recycling waste.
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay”
Extract from the poem “The Deserted Village”, by Irish born novelist, playwright, dramatist and poet, Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774).
In Goldsmith’s poem, “The Deserted Village”, latter published as a poem but also as a political broadside, in 1770; the poet laments the total decline of rural life and the depopulation of the countryside.
Same decline had been brought about as a result of commonage land enclosure, by greedy, wealthy individuals then in power; eventually leading to the destruction of the livelihoods of peasants and subsistence farmers.
“Those fence-less fields the sons of wealth divide
And ev’n the bare-worn common* is denied”.
[* ‘bare-worn common’ – land that was owned by more than one person.]
This poem remains as up to date today, as it did in 1770, when first dedicated to the 18th century English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792).
However, today, the then 18th century land grabs by the wealthy and power hungry, have changed name and are known as ‘Local Property Tax’, (LPT), latter introduced in 2013 to provide we were told “a stable funding base for local authorities” and to supposedly deliver “significant structural reform”.
“Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed:
In nature’s simplest charms at first arrayed;
But verging to decline, its splendours rise,
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise;
While, scourged by famine from the smiling land,
The mournful peasant leads his humble band;
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms — a garden, and a grave.”
Currently, we reside in a town where elected representatives and highly paid Municipal District Council officials are no longer embarrassed by their abject failure to administrate.
Same was evidenced today when a Government Minister visited the town to officially opened an upgraded Liberty Square and the public were not invited to attend, despite same being invited 4 years ago to contribute their vision for the future of this same town centre area.
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