Little Bray residents to commemorate 20th anniversary of Hurricane Charlie
Friday next, 25th August, will be the 20th anniversary of the floods known as ‘Hurricane Charlie’, and Little Bray, one of the communities most affected by it, is commemorating in three unusual ways:-
1. fundraising to pay for their ongoing battle to prevent high density building on the flood plain downriver from their homes: their Appeal against Bray Town Council’s decision to grant permission to Pizarro Developments to build on the old Bray Golf Club lands next to the river is with An Bord Pleanala at present;
2. launching an e-mail campaign from their web site - www.braywatch.com - targeted at the three parties (Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour) whose local councillors voted to rezone the flood plain in December, ‘04, and asking local Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, to fulfil his Government’s 20 year old promise to fund flood protection works;
3. launching a ‘protest song’, which will become the anthem of SWAP’s ongoing fight: the community group takes its name from its request to ’swap’ proposed high density buildings on the flood plain with a park and playing pitch planned for the high ground away from the river, as part of the same development.
The protest song, written to the air of ‘Ol Man River’, was deliberately chosen because of its connection with the Mississippi river and New Orleans, whose poor black population suffered most in the terrible flooding following Hurricane Katrina, which began on 29th August last year. Critics of the way the disaster in New Orleans was handled, blamed it on lack of maintenance of the levees, allowing development where it had previously been banned because of the dangers of exacerbated flooding, and a failure to respond adequately to the emergency.
Little Bray is asking that supporters of their campaign to ’swap’ this development round would remember their community by lighting a candle on Friday, 25th August - and that they would remember the people of New Orleans in the same way the following Tuesday, 29th.
Further information from:
Noeleen McManus
for SWAP
087.6347533
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