Members of the Carrick-on-Suir MD were told that as part of applications for grants under the Festivals and Events Scheme there were three newcomers in the district this year.
Two of those were in the Community category – the Fethard Festival and The Pit Songs Festival, however, it was the 175th Anniversary of the Slievenamon Monster Meeting 1848 that caused debate.
The council suggested transferring €800 from the Community Grants scheme to festivals in order to allocate some money to the commemorative event.
This transfer of €800 was accepted and has brought the scheme to an overall €14,300 – leaving community grants short the same going from €50,000 to €49,200.
Cllr. Kieran Bourke proposed increasing the allocation further but couldn’t gather the supporting stating that he could understand why his colleagues didn’t want to take more from community funds, but feels this particular festival deserves more financial support.
“It will be hugely beneficial to the area for tourism and if this festival is allowed to develop it could be huge, so I asked my colleagues and I asked the administrator is there any way that we could improve the grant that we were giving to them. If we were to give more money to this particular festival it would come out of community backed projects so the other councillors were reluctant to do so, and I suppose when it was pointed out like that I could see their point it is a pity we couldn’t have had funding from a different source.”
Cllr. Bourke is still hopeful they will still secure enough funding for the event.
“They will get finding from other steams of funding and I am aware that they have gotten funding from other areas, I was just hoping that we could have given them a little more but unfortunately it wasn’t possible.”
