Carmel Somers' Good Things Cafe set to move to Skibbereen

There’s good news this month on the hospitality front for West Cork’s Skibbereen.

The town’s historic Eldon Hotel has been sold to a local family, the O’Donovans, while one of the country’s top chefs, Carmel Somers, and her niche cookery school, Good Things Cafe, is to move to Skibbereen in the New Year from its seasonal Durrus base, after 13 years on the Sheeps Head peninsula.

And, in further changes and signs of recovery in the tourist trade and along the Wild Atlantic Way, the famed former music bar Connolly’s of Leap is reopening as a licensed dance and music venue prior to Christmas after nine years closed.