The industrial correspondent of The Irish Times, Chris Dooley, yesterday won the Connacht Gold/John Healy National Print Award.
His award was for a feature on Brazilian immigrant workers in Roscommon. The awards were presented by Letirim-based author John McGahern at a ceremony in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim.
The editor of the Sligo Champion, Seamus Finn, was the overall national winner of the award for journalism. He won for his coverage of the controversy which surrounded the provision of the new Kazelain Project for homeless people in Sligo. He was cited for coverage which took the heat out of the controversy and resulted in its acceptance in the community. He also won the local print award.
Eamon de Buitléar won the national radio & TV award for a documentary broadcast by TG4 on the revival of the Galway hooker.
The local radio award was won by Seamus Duke, news editor of Shannonside Radio, for a documentary on the visit of the Leitrim GAA team to New York to play the local team in the Connacht football championship.
The awards were instituted to focus positive media attention on the province of Connacht and to commemorate the late John Healy, who was a long-term advocate of western development and the doyen of political commentators.
Mr Aaron Forde, chief executive of Connacht Gold Co-op, said the need to continue to focus media attention on Connacht was underlined by the fact that the economic gap between the province and the south and east regions continued to widen, despite the Government commitment to balanced regional development contained in the National Development Plan.
He said two major EU decisions with the capacity to seriously hurt farming in the west of Ireland were prime examples of political failure to protect the State's national interests. The proposed nitrates action plan and the creation and continued addition of new special areas of conservation were particularly discriminatory against West of Ireland farming, he said.