EDITORIAL: Say it loud and sing it proud...our town is better than your town

This week's editorial in The Nationalist

Pride of place is a wonderful thing, especially for a newspaper, when that same pride stokes the flames of a latent rivalry.

Everyone wants to believe that their village or town is better than the next one over. These feelings stir a little stronger when the area being discussed is in another county.

It is something in all of us, whether we realise it or not, to defend where we’re from and to boast about our area.

You’d imagine that determination to defend a town or village is even greater for someone in local governance, whose responsibility it is to ensure that a place is pleasant to live in for residents.

Eamonn Wynne of The Nationalist attended the Clonmel Borough District meeting for July and captured an intriguing remark by a senior council official.

The full report is in this week’s paper. Essentially, a local representative at the meeting mentioned how some people had said to him that Dungarvan is a good model of how to manage parking arrangements in a town.

District Manager, Sinead Carr, replied: “’We’re not Dungarvan, we are a far better quality town.” A wonderful retort from someone who was instinctively defending her patch.

And why shouldn’t Ms Carr be of that opinion? More power to her and the local authority. We must believe we’re better and advertise that we’re better.

Clonmel is a great town, of course it is. We all know there are things to improve on and the councillor’s scrutiny is to be welcomed, but the visceral and confident reaction of Ms Carr is refreshing.

She doesn’t doubt for a second that Clonmel is a better quality town than Dungarvan.

Maybe other towns should look at how we’re handling things in Clonmel, if we’re to believe Ms Carr, they could learn a thing or two.

Let’s be confident about our towns and villages in Tipperary.

And if you’re from Clonmel, say it loud and sing it proud, “we’re not Dungarvan, we are a far better quality town”.