Thurles Information

“The Town Centre First policy aims to create town centres that function as viable, vibrant and attractive locations for people to live, work and visit, while also functioning as the service, social, cultural and recreational hub for the local community.” – Quote taken from Tipperary Co. Council’s commitment.

Without warning, they struck early this morning. Up came the long ago deceased ‘Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’. Having tossed a coin, left behind was the still barely surviving small group of rather delicate frail and confused, low-maintenance ‘Potentilla Dasiphora fruticosa ‘White Lady‘; the latter well-known for being resistant to attacks by rabbits in rural areas. (Very important to a rural town like Thurles with a large rabbit population).

Yes, I am talking about that large piece of wasteland, (some in their innocence may have called it a flowerbed), located centre on Liberty Square, Thurles, which for well over a year, has replaced some 20 car-parking spaces, thus driving consumers out of the town centre, to surrender their purchasing power to well-known German supermarket chains.

Here at Thurles.Info we decided, (following on in true Tipperary Co. Council fashion), to employ a landscape consultant and I might add not just any English fly-by-night consultancy.
Regardless of expense we sought the services of that long established landscape consultancy firm of ‘Root In The Hole Ltd,’ ©.

In the interests of fair play they decided to invite the local Thurles community, asking them to submit what they would like to see planted on this waste ground and in keeping with Tipperary Co. Council tradition, those who forwarded submissions were ignored on the basis that elected Co. Councillors and their Council Officials know best.

After the area was surveyed by two top gardening experts, employed by ‘Root In The Hole Ltd’©, same forwarded their findings/recommendations in the form of photographic evidence, shown in the video above.
In Root In The Hole’s report, which we won’t be publishing for fear of embarrassing certain individuals. Suffice is to say; sentences containing text like “Worst landscaping ever observed to date”, appear at least 6 times in the report, and a concluding phrase suggests that the ‘Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’, at the very least may have been recovered, having been first dumped from a garden centre, on waste ground, before being planted in Liberty Square.

Then again I suppose we could always cement this piece of waste ground over completely and paint a bird on it.

Readers might wonder about the reference to the 18th century weighing scales in our video; same located today in Co. Galway.
This same weighing scales type, which also was used on Liberty Square, sitting on a quadropod, during this same historical period, has now been located and can be made available to Thurles Municipal District Council.
Same could be erected in the centre of this flower bed, to remind us and any lost foreign tourist, of our humble beginnings when, prior to our Liberty Square down-grading, we had a once busy flourishing town centre.