Major new television series starts filming this week as part of RTÉ-wide
campaign to support Irish jobs
Filming starts this week on Local Heroes – A Town Fights Back, a new television series that is part of a major RTÉ campaign to support Irish jobs.
Local Heroes is an RTÉ-wide campaign to support Irish jobs, beginning this autumn. As part of that campaign there will be a number of programmes on RTÉ Television and Radio, including the six-part television programme, Local Heroes – A Town Fights Back, which will follow the people of one town as they come together to take their economic future into their own hands and start the fight-back for jobs.
Drogheda, Co Louth has felt the full effects of the downturn with nearly one third of the town’s population unemployed. Now its citizens have decided they’ve had enough. Local Heroes – A Town Fights Back will follow the people of Drogheda as they work alongside Senator Feargal Quinn and an assembled team of experts to try to kick-start their local economy.
Their efforts to save and create jobs in their community over the course of the next three months will be documented for a six-part television series beginning in November on RTÉ One Television.
During that three month period Today with Pat Kenny on RTÉ Radio 1 will be checking in with the experts and giving regular updates on the progress of the people of Drogheda as they work together to come up with and road test imaginative ideas and solutions that could help their local economy start to recover and lead to jobs creation.
Senator Feargal Quinn said, “Towns and communities throughout Ireland are facing many challenges. How do we overcome these obstacles? It is easy to assume that individuals’ actions don’t matter when it comes to the economy. But they do! Each of us can play our part if we put our heart in to it. We can all become local heroes by doing our bit for Irish jobs.”
While the focus will be on a number of traditional areas like entrepreneurship, tourism and business, Feargal will also encourage the people of Drogheda to come up with more creative responses to tackle this major challenge.
It all started with a Town Hall meeting in Drogheda on 7th September where a broad cross-section of local people, from business to arts to community groups, assembled to discuss the situation, with Pat Kenny facilitating that discussion.
The people of Drogheda will now be invited to attend an Ideas Summit where they will be set a target of coming up with 20 big ideas that the whole community can implement over the next three months. These ideas will involve tackling jobs creation in a direct all-community way as well as removing local obstacles to employment.
Feargal Quinn will be on hand throughout to help Drogheda’s Local Heroes put in place the framework that will be needed to implement all of the ideas generated.
All of us can become Local Heroes. The people of Drogheda hope to show other towns throughout the rest of the country what is possible when a community comes together with a common purpose. Through their actions over the next three months, they want to create a template for an every-town, every-citizen response to the economic crisis that can be adopted and built on by communities across the country.
As part of the broader Local Heroes campaign, a full catalogue of the ideas and initiatives tried in Drogheda will be made available on the RTÉ website so that other towns and communities can draw on the experience of Drogheda and start their own economic renewal.
Today with Pat Kenny will also be visiting other towns around Ireland to see how they are mirroring the Local Heroes initiatives being implemented in Drogheda.
Local Heroes – A Town Fights Back is produced by Animo Television for RTÉ Television
ENDS
Date: 8th September 2011