Sir John Beech

Subterranean Ireland: the last frontier

LORNA SIGGINS, Western Correspondent

Ireland’s caves present a daunting challenge to divers, but for Artur Kozlowski, who died in Co Galway this week, that was the attraction

UNDER A LARGE beech tree on John Nolan’s farmland in Kiltartan, Co Galway, several steps lead down to the cave known as Pollonora. The steps have many imprints, for this was where pitchers and buckets were once filled from a community’s well. “There was always water there, even when everywhere else was dry,” says Nolan. The limestone landscape, with its turloughs and underground streams, is more accustomed to flooding than drought.

It was through Pollonora’s narrow stone archway that the 33-year-old Polish cave diver Artur Kozlowski descended on Monday for what was to be his last expedition. As he explained beforehand in a quick chat with Nolan, it would be a “long dive” but one that he had been “looking forward to for the past three years”.

“Artur was the first to explore Pollonora, although we have had cave divers coming here for the past couple of decades,” Nolan says. The labyrinth of sumps, sinkholes and caverns between the Slieve Aughty Mountains and the Burren is to international cave divers what the Aileens wave in Co Clare is to surfers.

It was here that Martyn Farr, a Wales-based speleologist – cave explorer or expert – who trained Kozlowski, had previously set a record for the longest (245m) and deepest (34m) sump exploration in Ireland. Farr was a member of the Dark Shamrock expedition that navigated more than three kilometres of flooded caves south of Kinvara, Co Galway, in the 1990s.

“Ireland was my backyard from 1971 until about four years, ago,” he says. “I came over every summer – to Fermanagh, to Mayo, to south Galway and, recently, to Cong on the Galway-Mayo border – because Ireland is the ultimate challenge in western Europe.

Some rather late and ineffective justice for Luton fans « Football ...

There was some small crumb of comfort for Luton fans in the news that four of the directors of the previous owners of the club had been banned from being company directors ( 1 ) (and hence now fail the Fit and Proper Person Test).  Former chairman Bill Tomlins was disqualified for six years; Derek Robert Peter, the former CEO and a chartered accountant was disqualified for seven years, and Richard Sidney Bagehot and John Mitchell were each disqualified for three years.

The official statement from the Insolvency Service ( 2 ) who investigated Luton Town, or more exactly the old company, Luton Town Football Club Limited (“LTFC”) – which is not in any way connected with present owners Luton 2020 – makes clear the scale of what had been going on under the club’s previous owners:

The investigation by The Insolvency Service found that the directors of LTFC had breached Football Association (FA) and FIFA rules and caused LFTC to trade at the risk and detriment of HM Revenue and Customs (“HMRC”), being in arrears with PAYE and NIC within a few months of commencing to trade and recently not declaring or paying its VAT liability.