This Saturday morning, President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, will visit Clare Island, after which she will head inland to Westport, to celebrate their success in the 2008 National Tidy Towns Competition.
The festivities in Westport will commence at 12pm where there will be an array of street entertainment, before a formal ceremony and reception at Westport Leisure Park.
Earlier that morning the President will visit Clare Island where the centenary celebrations of the Clare Island Survey will be launched.
The biological survey, completed on Clare Islands, was led by famous botanist, Robert Lloyd Praeger, began in 1909, and is the largest multi-disciplinary survey of a specific area ever undertaken to date. In 1991, the Royal Irish Academy announced the New Survey of Clare Island, which uses the vast amount of data collected in the first survey to compare changes over the last 100 years, and will publish the findings in 10 separate volumes, six of which have been completed to date. These comparisons provide insight into the effect of factors such as agricultural practice and land use, and perhaps most importantly, climate change.
