June - Summer welcome for visitors but not flash floods in city!

June began with a bumper bank holiday weekend on the cards for the city with both the Cat Laughs Festival on and a high-stakes Dublin versus Kildare senior football clash scheduled at UPMC Nowlan Park.
Hotels and guesthouses scrambled to keep up with the overwhelming demand.

Kilkenny County Council, in partnership with Kilkenny Volunteer Centre, were also gearing up for peak tourist season with the launch of the Kilkenny Welcome Team.

The Welcome Team are a group of 20 trained volunteers who meet and greet visitors, providing a warm Kilkenny welcome along with visitor information over the summer months.

There were fears the Kilkenny-Waterford boundary row would reignite when multiple submissions to the Electoral Commission called for a transfer of land and voters.

Separating Carlow entirely from Kilkenny, moving parts of Wexford into Kilkenny and splitting up Kilkenny into ‘North’ and ‘South’ and latching them onto other constituencies were just some of the suggestions made to the Electoral Commission, which was gearing up to redraw constituency boundaries in light of population changes.

But another common suggestion, which caused alarm, was to subsume territory from South Kilkenny into Waterford, making it a five-seat constituency.

A clampdown on a group of young ‘thugs’ who were terrorising retailers on High Street was urgently needed according to members of Kilkenny’s Joint Policing Committee (JPC) in June.

Latest crime statistics revealed that there had been a significant increase in thefts from shops in the first three months of the year. From January to March of this year there were 98 thefts from shops reported in the Kilkenny and Thomastown Garda Districts — an increase of over 62%.