The condition of the celebrated and much-loved Ladies’ Slip in Tramore must have brought a tear to many a visitor’s eye at the Bank Holiday weekend just past, a former Town Mayor is convinced.

“Lying shattered and broken for months now, it resembles more the site of a bunker-busting bomb raid than a jewelled feature of one of Ireland’s main beach resorts”, Cllr Joe Conway complained this week.

And he submitted that the County Council’s failure to act “represents a catalogue of bone-headed inaction by a body that has a duty to our town, whether they like or realise it”.

He said: “Tramore is nationally and internationally famous as a beach resort – it makes no sense at all to allow the beach and its infrastructure to lapse into this appalling condition of neglect. The County Council is not a generative creator of employment, I know, but it has a responsibility to support our economic viability by fulfilling its duty of care to Tramore, its people and its visitors”.

He said he had been in touch with the Area Engineer late last week on the matter and she informed him that she had got the staff to do the work, but not the money. “This is incredible, especially in a week that has seen a bunch of metal flowers sprout up opposite the Majestic, at a cost of sixty-thousand euro”, he commented. “If you asked anyone in Tramore the question – would you rather that money be spent repairing the Ladies Slip, or emplacing a bunch of bronze Irises, I don’t think you would have to employ any research guru to interpret the results. Public Art is very commendable, but safety and viability of the resort would surely have to take precedence.

“In effect, this illustrates yet again how out-of-touch Waterford County Council can be when dealing with Tramore. We have removed people in Dungarvan making insensitive and inappropriate decisions for us down here, in a demeanour akin to the last days of the Raj.

“It is one of the main issues that I am appealing to people to think about in the run-up to the County Council elections at the beginning of June. Do we want a continuation of this semi-detached type of local government from Dungarvan, or do we want a culture change in our representation and the way we stand up for ourselves”.