Kilrush is a coastal town in County Clare, Ireland. It is also the name of a civil parish and an ecclesiastical parish in Roman Catholic Diocese of Killaloe. It is located near the mouth of the River Shannon in the south-west of the county. Kilrush is one of the listed Heritage Towns of Ireland. The area was officially classified as part of the West Clare Gaeltacht, an Irish-speaking community, until 1956.
Kilrush today
The old port of Kilrush is now home to a 120 berth marina with automatic lock gate access to the Shannon Estuary, Scattery Island and the wild Atlantic Ocean. An impressive walled garden on the grounds of the old Vandeleur estate can still be visited today, though Kilrush House was gutted by fire in the late 19th century and finally demolished in the 1970s due to safety hazard. It stood where the main central car park now stands.
The nearby Moneypoint power station began construction in 1979 and was commissioned between 1985 and 1987. This brought a large economic boost to the town and wider region, with Moneypoint establishing itself as one of the primary employers in West Clare. However, due to a governmental climate change plan to cease burning coal in Moneypoint by 2025, electricity production has fallen massively, at times producing nothing. In 2019, it was announced that the workforce would be cut by more than half, raising fears for the economic health of the area.
The retail scene of Kilrush has changed massively in recent times, being almost unrecognizable to 2 decades previous. Large retailers such as Tesco (Opened 2008)) and Aldi (Opened 2009) have opened in the town, however a significant amount of smaller retailers have closed since the turn of the decade, almost decimating streets such as Moore Street.
Kilrush was the host venue for the 2013 National Famine Commemoration.
Offshore resides a large pod of Bottlenose dolphins who are resident year-round in the estuary. Dolphin-watching tour boats depart daily from the Kilrush marina, and the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation has an information centre nearby.
Kilrush has been twinned with the town of Plouzané in Brittany, France since 1982.
In 2015, Kilrush won an Entente Florale gold medal, a European-wide horticultural and environmental competition. Kilrush represented Ireland in the ‘Village’ category of the competition for population centres of less than 5,000 people.
