Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter: Development Fund Initiative and Letterkenny-Milford

While our organisation receives no central funding from the State, we are very dependent on pockets of funding to carry out our work.

The main funding that we receive is the Development Fund Initiative (DFI) from members of the Letterkenny Milford Municipal District of Donegal County Council.

Local councillors are very supportive of our efforts, and we are delighted that Cllr Donal ‘Mandy’ Kelly, along with Cllr Tomas Sean Devine, sit on our committee. This year, we received €3,400 under the DFI. This money allows us to get a lot of work done and is pivotal to facilitating our cultural programme of events, especially the Literary Festival, as the funding for that event is simply inadequate.

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But it also helps to organise the events for Heritage Week, as well as get repairs done in the locality, such as fixing the gate in between No. 1 and No. 3 Church Lane.

While we are very grateful to the local authority and to the councillors for this fund and other grants, we would make suggestions to improve the administration of these schemes. It would be really helpful if they raised the limit to where you don’t have to get quotas for specific jobs from €250 to €500. In community work, you build up relationships with tradespeople, and it is a real nuisance if you get three quotes for what in reality is only a small piece of work.



Rosemount
While the greater Cathedral Quarter area of Church Lane, Castle Street, Speers Lane, Upper Main Street and Market Square is a very historical part of Letterkenny, we realise that there are others and none more so than Rosemount. In recent times, the residents of the locality have come together to form a committee to protect and enhance their architectural heritage.

We, in the Cathedral Quarter, want to wish the new committee all the best in their efforts and their aims. Before we ever started doing flowers in our area, Rosemount always looked immaculate thanks to the efforts of its residents, spearheaded by the late Sheila Duffy and the late Margaret Duffy.

It is great to see that the baton is now being passed on to a new generation in fostering community pride. While there are derelict buildings on Rosemount Lane and Rosemount Terrace, our project has demonstrated that these old structures can be brought back to life while still retaining their character.

During the consultancy stages of the Letterkenny 2040 plan, there has been a lot of discussion on linkages between the traditional town centre and the newer part of the town. We hope that local authority planners take into account that the enhanced built heritage of Rosemount would certainly promote greater connectivity.

TBEX Conference
Finally, I would like to give a ‘Céad míle fáilte’ to all those who are attending the Travel Bloggers Exchange (TBEX) Conference taking place in the ATU Donegal in Letterkenny this week. We hope that the participants will spend time in the Cathedral Quarter and take plenty of photos and videos of our area.

I certainly hope to meet some of the bloggers on an individual basis during the week. For our part, the Elusive Theatre in association with Letterkenny CDP will be hosting the ‘Cathedral Quarter Experience’ this Thursday, at 7pm. The Experience starts outside No. 1 Church Lane where the bloggers will get an opportunity to find out about our area’s past in an educational and entertaining way. The whole conference offers Letterkenny and Donegal a massive opportunity and we are in no doubt, bloggers will be enthusiastic by our project.