The guard said that he had seen the driver standing on the platform, and then walking away. The 22.02 Victoria to Brighton main line service was marooned short of Preston Park station in East Sussex, Lewes Crown Court was told. A train driver was jailed for a year yesterday for abandoning passengers on an express after he drew to a halt outside a station and walked off. “We don’t make moral decisions on what our customers should or should not buy.”The French Embassy refused to comment last night on the boycott call.One vigorous backer of the campaign is the Hampstead Theatre in north- west London, no stranger to political protests having banned South African goods more than 20 years ago.. “We want to send a message to Jacques Chirac and the French government that we believe it is a crime to poison and contaminate the ocean, sea-life, vegetation and people of the Pacific,” it said.Supermarkets said they were not concerned about the ban unless it made a dent in sales.Sainsbury’s said, although France was one of the company’s major foreign suppliers, it would not be taking action.”Boycotts are not unknown and we are not worried at the moment,” a spokeswoman said. He is trying to have the Cromwellian star- shaped fort facing the harbour restored as a tourist attraction.. MATTHEW BRACE
An anonymous group of anti-nuclear protesters yesterday launched a campaign to support a boycott of French produce because of the decision by France to resume nuclear testing in the Pacific.
An open letter occupied a full page of the London Evening Standard calling for shoppers to “look at the label before you buy – if it says Made in France, put it back on the shelf and tell your retailer why”.
The steel skeleton of a new community centre is under construction. Five computers installed in the local school, part of a vocational educational scheme, are a hopeful first step towards “electronic cottage” endeavours.Bofiners’ problem has been isolation – the level of achievement is above the national average. Using existing telephone links the electronic super- highway may soon extend into the Atlantic.Tourism, offering superb swimming from sheltered white beaches, clear water and growing scuba diving appeal, is booming, boosted by peace in Northern Ireland and a striking absence of traffic – Inishbofin has barely a dozen cars.Paradoxically, given its past, Fr Sheridan’s most ambitious project is the epitome of reconciliation. The best soap operas are the things that really happen.”Efforts to revive community enterprise are now starting to bear fruit. State-funded courses teach pottery, photography and marine engine repairing. It’s really about self-pride – that a community will take pride in itself and in its island traditions.”An independent spirit, he shares many Bofiners’ feeling that development should not tarnish its rugged allure “We don’t want it to become a disco island Myself, I’ve thrown away my television.
We’re just getting the crumbs off the master’s table”) he also fears dependency, arguing island revival must come primarily from within: “There has to be a reason for getting up in the morning. You don’t rush things here,” he says, cutting a healthy slab of home-made soda bread for his visitors. Motivation, he believes, takes time.Echoing criticism of official neglect (“Any county with a city will spend all the money there. Years of decline saw the population fall from 1,404 in 1841 before the great famine to 762 in 1901. Since the Fifties, the total has remained resolutely less than 300.Sitting in his kitchen in Bofin village, Father Paddy Sheridan, the island’s priest since 1992, laments its decline and the stream of talented young people forced to emigrate, mainly west to New York, Philadelphia and California rather than east to Britain, where he served for 30 years in Liverpool, Birmingham and London “You hurry slowly.
It just seems ridiculous,” says Mrs Elliott.She says only a handful of the 100-odd adult Bofiners of working age have regular year-round employment. Resentment at Galway county council continues over sediment discolouring the water supply, which lacks a vital filter bed costing just IRpounds 2,000 (pounds 2,200) “Yet we’re paying thousands every year in water rates. “Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but the approval for our road repair scheme came through the following week,” she said.A road at the eastern end of the island has now been duly resurfaced. In the 19th century, when up to 10,000 men would gather to fish what were among Europe’s richest waters, a strong police presence was needed to keep order between rival groups of fishermen.Joanna Elliott, editor of the the Inishbofin Inquirer, proposed secession from Galway at a recent protest meeting over official neglect.
English troops are said to have tied the Bishop of Clonfert to an outlying rock at low tide and left him to drown.Other priests were reportedly held in one of the “blow holes” in the ground at Cloonamore mountain where sea-water surges up through underground caverns in a geyser-type effect. Conquered in 1653 by Cromwell’s army, partly to block Dutch expansion, it was one of several islands used to exile half the Irish Catholic priesthood. They even have their own European commissioner (social affairs commissioner Padraig Flynn hails from the county).
Not being part of a Gael-tacht, an Irish-speaking area, Inishbofin (from the Gaelic Inis bo finde – island of the white cow) is also denied industrial subsidies given to the three Aran islands further south.Relocating is not so far fetched, since it was once before part of Mayo Its history has been eventful. In neighbouring Co Mayo, they have better services and better roads. Tired of indifference from the local powers in distant Galway, the small Atlantic island of Inishbofin, four miles long and with a population of 200, is considering moving.
