There's jumping the housing list. Then there's jumping over the fence and straight into the house. And, according to a member of Tuam Town Commissioners, "it's an absolute disgrace."
Mr Paul O'Grady is reported in the Connacht Tribune telling his colleagues that, while canvassing for election in the town, he was met at the door of one house by a white stallion. He said the animal was being kept in the front room of one of the new houses in the Gilmartin Road area.
Of the equine resident, Mr O'Grady said it was "an absolute disgrace that a new house can be abused in this manner. Bad enough to be met by disgruntled people but to be met by a horse is another matter."
Residency problems continue in Donegal, where last week the Donegal Democrat reported on the County Council's handling of a dispute over whether a group of Travellers should occupy the Market Yard area of Ballyshannon.
This was against the backdrop of a health officer's report which said the Travellers constituted a health hazard. There was a report that the council had spent more on its legal attempts to have the Travellers ejected than it would have on providing a halting site.
This week the Democrat reports the county manager, Mr Michael McLoone, as asserting, "There has to be an end to `not in my back yard politics' in relation to . . . providing halting sites."
Despite local opposition to Traveller sites in many areas, he said, the reality remained that sites would have to be found throughout the county.
Traveller site problems are reported also in the Drogheda In- dependent, which tells that planning permission was refused for a group housing scheme for Travellers by Meath County Council. The scheme for 10 houses on a three-acre site owned by Drogheda Corporation in Bryanstown, Drogheda was refused on the grounds of "zoning and public health".
In Kerry, the problems are not so much where to live but where to eat. As the Kerryman tells it, the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant in Killarney was convicted on two counts of assault on customers when they disputed a bill.
Mr Brendan McMahon told the court that he and his wife Martina had been unhappy with a part of the bill, that Alan Chan had increased it and that when they left the restaurant having paid the lesser amount, Chan "came outside and accosted" them. Chan was fined £65 and ordered to pay witness expenses of £180.
Many of the papers have either reports or editorials on the vagaries of our licensing laws. The Offaly Express has a front-page report on an "ambush" on the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, by Fianna Fail backbenchers, as his plans to change the laws "crucially did not address the key demand of provincial publicans for 12.30 a.m. all-year-round opening."
The Longford News editorial describes the Justice Minister's "climb-down" on plans to change the laws as "yet another example of how easy it is for people at the top in Government to lose touch with their backbenchers and to totally miscalculate the mood of the people in the parishes."
Publicans "are faced with unfair competition from clubs within the entertainment industry and yet . . . are expected to sit back and watch the law makers continue to ignore the real needs of a responsible public and an equally responsible licensed profession," it says.
On proposals for 24-hour pub opening to celebrate the Millennium, it cries: "Big deal! Must we wait another 1,000 years to see fair play for publicans every day and not just on New Year's Eve?"
Meanwhile, the Connaught Telegraph has a graphic and disturbing report of a cruelty to animals case heard before Westport Court.
The defendant, who was sentenced to three months, had kept his farm in "foul condition". The remains of a dead cow were being eaten by dogs and wildlife; sheep which had drowned in a flood "were blown up into the bushes where some remained until being blown down during the storms of last Christmas; three pups were found in a cubicle in a "fierce state of starvation . . . with an unknown depth of excrement and urine"; a cow's carcass was dragged half way between the shed and the back door and an attempt had been made to set it on fire; a cow was found "up to her hocks in muck and unable to free herself."
In the same field, the garda found "the remains of 20 unburied sheep". The defendant was also fined £1,000.
Another court, this one in Tuam, heard how, licensing laws or none, football fans in the town were not to be thwarted. There were, literally, buckets of beer for the asking at the football stadium when a number of youths stole barrels of the brew, took them to the stadium, "tapped" them and proceeded to distribute the beer about the stand.
The case has been adjourned, pending, no doubt, sober reflection.
