Cork towns won’t be able to twin with others

Towns in Co Cork will no longer be able to “twin” with counterparts in other countries under new rules being applied by Cork County Council, though there will be scope for larger area or regional hook-ups.

An initial proposal for Skibbereen to twin with a town in the USA has been changed after the council’s corporate affairs department thought it would be more beneficial to expand the twinning proposal to cover larger areas.

Skibbereen had proposed to enter into a formal twinning arrangement with Scituate, a seaside town midway between Boston and Plymouth County in Massachusetts.

But senior council officials deemed the twinning area to be too small to be of major economic benefit to Cork and said it should be expanded to almost county-size status, bringing in other neighbouring smaller towns and villages in the US region under the same umbrella.

Officials said they were happy, though, that both areas were similar, with economies which relied on marine tourism, fishing, and agriculture, especially as that Massachusetts area was known for a high percentage of Irish descendants.

Cllr Christopher O’Sullivan said his hometown of Clonakilty has benefitted massively from twinning links which had brought in many visitors and felt the more regional twinning now being proposed could only be good for West Cork as a whole.

However, Cllr Pat Murphy, who is based in Bantry, had a word of warning about the new corporate policy.

“It’s a lot easier for towns to twin with each other.

“It gets a bit harder when you are dealing with a whole district or with a region,” he said.

Cllr Paul Hayes said there were “a lot of positives for twinning,” but wondered how this would be progressed on a municipal level.

A senior council official said that the corporate affairs department would set in train the formalities of the broader twinnings in this case and future cases and would now make contact directly with the Scituate region to set that in motion.