Yesteryears - 13 employees of Tipperary-based company in freedom flight from Baghdad
Our front page of December 15, 1990, led with Eamonn Wynne’s good news story that the Clonmel Swimming Pool, which at that stage had been closed for 18 months, would reopen the following May or early June of 1991.
A £500,000 contract had been signed that week for the refurbishment work by contractor Eamonn O’Gorman of O’Gorman Construction, the Mayor, Alderman Sean Lyons and the county manager, Seamus Hayes.
Approximately half of the required local contribution of £87,500 had been collected and at the Town Hall the chairman of the fundraising committee, Sean Galvin, made a plea for the remaining £43,000 to be raised.
Another story on the front page informed readers that 13 employees of the Clonmel-based MF Kent Group flew home on a freedom flight from Baghdad that week without Clonmel man John White who had been dramatically prevented from leaving by the Iraqi authorities in a last-minute development.
Elsewhere that week the Industry and Commerce Minister, Desmond O’Malley, was to be asked to intervene in the decision by his Junior Minister, Michael Smith, to call for a vastly scaled down version of the unique Integrated Resource Centre in Cashel.
Furious Cashel councillors were to urge Mr O’Malley to allow the centre to proceed as originally planned with £400,000 in grant aid from the Department of Science and Technology.
The Nationalist itself made front page news also that week when esteemed editor Brendan Long announced that our final edition of the year, on December 29, would contain a special 128-page supplement to mark the centenary of our first publication which was printed in 1890.