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TV and silver screen actor Martin Sheen, star of ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Wall Street’ and ‘The West Wing , will be filming in Fethard, Co Tipperary, in the coming weeks in his latest movie, Stella Days.
 McCarthy's Bar Among the locations chosen for shooting this film are Fethard’s famous McCarthy’s Hotel, the local town hall and Holy Trinity Church.
McCarthy’s Hotel is well known the world over and has been filmed by Channel 4, BBC, Good Morning America, Sky News to name a few. Many well known personalities have visited McCarthy’s over the years including President Eamon De Valera, General Michael Collins, Mick Doyle, John Magnier, Vincent O’Brien, Robert Sangster, Julian Wilson, Lester Pigott, Richard Dunwoody, Adrian Maguire, Martin Pipe, Charlie Swan, Tommy Stack, Tommy Carberry, Alex Ferguson, Dr. A. J. F. O’Reilly, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and his brother Julian, Sir David Frost, Alan Parker, Rod Taylor, Angela Rippon, Peter Curling and of course Paul Carberry, latter the only jockey to ride into McCarthy’s Hotel on a horse.
McCarthy’s Hotel is also a place of interest for those who believe in ghosts and the supernatural. A sign was given before the deaths of the last generation of the McCarthy family, usually a picture falls from the wall for no apparent reason. Ghosts were spotted recently by Mark Lonergan and John O’Connor at night and by Ciarán Hayes in the afternoon. So if Martin Sheen should see somebody sitting quietly sipping a pint in the corner, he just might be the only one who can see him.
Crowd Scene Casting
Meanwhile, casting will takes place today, in Fethard, for the extras needed for some of the church and hall crowd scenes.
So all you aspiring thespians out there, as well as those out for a bit of craic, you are advised to attend the local ballroom today between 2pm and 8pm.
Break a leg everyone.
Now aged in his seventies, Ramón Antonio Gerard Estévez, better known by his stage name Martin Sheen returns to his Irish ancestral county of Tipperary, as cameras are set to roll on the set of Newgrange Pictures’ new feature film ‘Stella Days’ on Sunday, November 7th.
Tipperary will play host to this Golden Globe winner from ‘The West Wing’, ‘Apocalypse Now’ and also Oscar nominee Stephen Rea of ‘The Crying Game’ and ‘Ondine’ fame, both of whom will lead the film’s impressive cast.
Martin Sheen was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Mary Ann Phelan, 1903–1951 and Francisco Estévez 1898–1974, who were a factory worker and machinery inspector respectively at the National Cash Register Company at the time. Both parents were immigrants; his mother was born in Borrisokane, County Tipperary, Ireland and his father in Parderrubias, Galicia, Spain.
Written by Antoine O’Flathartha and directed by IFTA winning Irish director Thaddeus O’Sullivan of ‘Into the Storm’ and ‘December Bride’, fame, the Newgrange Pictures production will see Martin Sheen play parish priest, Daniel Barry, whose love for the cinema leads him on a path to help set up a local cinema in the town. But Daniel comes up against opposition from doubtful local parishioners who question his faith and a Bishop who is more interested in raising funds for a new church.
‘Stella Days‘ is scheduled to shoot for about five weeks under the photographic direction of John Christian Rosenlund and will be edited in a Dublin post house following its shoot. The drama is being produced by Jackie Larkin and Maggie Pope and funds of €600,000 have been awarded by the Irish Film Board towards the making of the film.
So let’s show Martin and company a true Tipperary homecoming welcome.
Search engine Google are at pains to assure people their privacy is being fully protected when the search engine launched its new Irish Street View facility on Thursday last.
This Street View facility allows Internet or smart phone users to view streets, roads, houses and buildings throughout the State. The images showing were gathered by cameras on Google’s specially adapted vehicles which have travelled 82,000km (51,000 miles) around the country since March 2009.
The service, which originally began with five US cities in 2007 and now includes 25 countries, allows users to switch to a panoramic street level view, moving up and down streets with the double click of a mouse. It is an without doubt an exhilarating slice of real science fiction and the initial impact on individuals when it went live on Thursday last was to check what their house looked like. Here in Thurles the images show details of real everyday urban life and footage were obviously captured about the time of the last Urban District and County Council elections. This facility is likely to encourage business and private property owners alike, to ensure that building facades are in future kept clean, inviting and attractive.
Ireland is the 25th country to launch Street View and no doubt this facility will be of particularly interest to tourists checking out an area in advance, before booking their accommodation and also for prospective house buyers looking at an area’s amenities if not the proposed house to be purchased.
The “Street View Ireland” facility in general is currently available on maps.google.com. You can view Thurles hereunder and do click on View Larger Map under the image for best quality image clarity.
However, concerns have been expressed that it could also breach people’s privacy. For example there are fears that criminals could use it to target houses for burglary. Other countries such as Germany, Switzerland and Greece have been critical of the overall project. However Goggle’s exactness in blurring faces and car number plates, should eliminate most peoples privacy concerns.
Launching the new service,Thurles born Minister for Tourism, Mary Hanafin said that ‘Street View’ had “huge potential” for Irish tourism, and also for business and education. However Thurles people might not agree fully with this statement since (Google Please take note) St.Mary’s Lane between Kickham Street and Mitchel Street which incorporates St.Mary’s Famine and War Museum has once again been overlooked. Still Fáilte Ireland doesn’t acknowledge we exist so why should Google.
The initiative is fully supported by Fáilte Ireland, the Arts Council, and various property websites. Fáilte Ireland plans to have it available on touch screens in all its tourist offices and regard it as the best form of free advertising that any country can enjoy.
The programme contains imagery that for the most part is already visible from public roads and it displays footage that is taken at a particular point in time and does not display live images. Over all Thurles, which represents a true, hidden, unspoiled Ireland, will welcome this new initiative.
 Part of the beautiful Lough Derg shore line viewed from Co.Tipperary Branches of the Shannon Protection Alliance in Nenagh, Co Tipperary and Athlone Co. Westmeath have welcomed the setting up of a further lobby group in Limerick, which oppose the plan to extract millions of litres of water from Lough Derg’s shoreline in Co.Tipperary. This new opposition comes as a result of Dublin City Council unveiling plans to extract 500 million litres of water from Lough Derg to supply the greater Dublin region.
This controversial plan would envisage water being extracted at a rate of 500 million litres per day from an extraction point, possibly to be constructed at Terryglass, a village situated in North Tipperary.
Dublin City Council plans to pipe this water to Garryhinch Bog in Co. Offaly, where it intends to design “an innovative water based eco-park with fishing, boating, cycling, water and leisure sports on 500 acres, with a major water storage reservoir.”
The council expect that the water stored at this reservoir will not only be a new water source for the greater Dublin area, but will also supply counties Westmeath, Offaly, Meath, Wicklow and Kildare.
The project is set to cost €540m and will create an estimated 1,000 construction jobs over three years as well as generating ongoing, sustainable, long-term jobs in the Midlands in the management of the eco-park activities and a water plant.
Originally the plan was to extract the water from Lough Ree, but following massive public pressure from local communities in Athlone and despite the fact that the distance between Athlone and Dublin is shorter than that between Lough Derg and our capital city the vision has now changed, with Lough Derg becoming the favoured target for this extraction point.
Opposition to Dublin City Council’s vision for North Tipperary has been relatively muted, when compared to the military precision of organised opposition mounted from the Lough Ree area, where groups marched on our Dail last year demonstrating strong resistance to taking water from their local pond.
Continue reading Lough Derg To Supply Dublin’s Water ?
Dublin! Dublin! Dublin! everything appears these days to be centred in and around Dublin. A plague on our Capital city say the dwellers from “Beyond the Pale.”
It now appears that this city formally known as “The Pale” is being promoted as a place for “Fun and Craic” in a new solo run using €1 million of our Tourism campaign funding.
 "The Pale" The word “pale ” (An Pháil) derives ultimately from the Latin word palus, meaning a stake, used to support a fence and from this came the figurative meaning of boundary and eventually the phrase “beyond the pale” as something outside the boundary of an area from Dundalk to Carrickmines Castle, Dublin known today as gullible “Rural Ireland.”
Minister for Tourism Mary Hanafin TD said that this new radio and online campaign by Tourism Ireland would be seen by an audience of over 12 million, British tourists. She correctly states that Britain is the largest single source market for visitors to the island of Ireland and provides more than half of all visitors to the island. This campaign will involve direct marketing and social media initiatives, as well as promotions with tour operators and air and sea carriers. It will capitalises on the British market and intensively promote Dublin to the British holidaymaker.
Frank Magee of Dublin Tourism states: “The capital city attracted 1.5 million visitors from Britain last year, which resulted in five million bed nights, but losing its market share in Britain. Dublin has been the driver in Irish tourism, bolstering the Irish figures in recent years and there’s a realisation that if Dublin doesn’t do well, Ireland doesn’t do well.”
What a load of verbal diarrhea Mr Magee. Ireland’s false reputation of being an expensive holiday destination is spread by Tourists who spend too much time in Dublin drinking €3.50 cups of coffee served by staff who do not speak English .
Come on down to Tipperary folks if you want a holiday offering value for your money. Thurles is the ancestral home of your head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and it is here you can experience friendly relaxation, carefree fun and craic, your children can run wild and run free, the air is clean and you can find your car still parked where you left it the night before.
It would appear rural Irish taxpayers, for far to long, have been the silent and subservient suppliers of ‘money on demand’ to support Dublin tourism, so let us keep things in perspective remembering that in 2009 the Irish Hotels Federation represented almost 1,000 hotels and guesthouses throughout the whole country, which in turn employ over 59,000 people. It seems only proper that those beyond the Pale should like their fair slice of the tourism promotion cake.
How Much Money Was Spent Promoting Our Capital City Dublin In The Past Ten Or So Years?
€5m for “The Monument of Light” or “Spire Of Light” erected in O’Connell Street, better known by the names: ‘The Spike’, ‘The Stiletto in the Ghetto’, ‘The Erection at the Intersection’, ‘The Poker next to Croker’ and ‘The Stiffy in the Liffey’. At the time of its erection on O’Connell Street in 2003, the Spire Of Light was described as “self-cleaning”, but Dublin’s city council now concede that its maintenance cost €205,000 last year and will increase to at least €218,000 this year, and thats before they pick up a discarded chip bag.
Continue reading Dublin – A Plague On Your City Says Rural Ireland
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