The near-perfect weather enhanced an already successful sheep racing event. (100083)

WITH the sheep race meeting over for another year and schools all over the British Isles breaking up, Sark businesses are now preparing for what they hope will be a bumper influx of visitors who – because of the recession – are choosing to have their holidays closer to home.

Thanks to some near-perfect weather, everyone I’ve spoken to about the sheep racing weekend has remarked on its success and how much those attending enjoyed it.

Since the demise of the Water Carnival a few years ago, the sheep race meeting is the event at which Miss Sark Princess is chosen and this year the honour went to eight-year-old Leilani Chatterton.

Leilani’s principal function will come at the end of the year at the annual cheque presentation event, when she formally hands over a cheque for what everyone hopes will be a huge amount of money to Dr Peter Counsell.

He will receive it on behalf of the Professor Saint Medical Trust, which subsidises the cost of prescribed medication to island residents.

As I remark often after such events, they can only be held if the huge amount of voluntary work by so many public-spirited residents continues – and this point was emphasised by Carnival Committee chairman Puffin Taylour when I spoke to her after the dust had settled and the Millennium Field cleared.

‘Don’t forget that this is always a committee and volunteer helpers’ effort,’ she warned, wagging a finger at me. ‘And we couldn’t hold it without the support of those who sponsor races and runners, who donate prizes and who spend money.’

The one very minor blot I saw on an otherwise lovely family occasion was the broken sign near the public toilets at the old island hall. It’s a sad reflection on society today that just as every village is said to have an idiot, so every event such as this attracts at least one moronic vandal. It’s such a shame.

*

Sark’s Chief Pleas sat earlier this month and I’ve been a little puzzled since then about why a request for £5,000 from the Agriculture Committee for funding the opportunity of gaining ‘Dark Skies Island’ status was withdrawn as it was about to be debated.

Without going into the merits or otherwise of the proposal – something a full debate in the legislature would have achieved, I am bound to say – I am told by, among others, some Chief Pleas members that the matter was pulled because a number of conseillers had indicated opposition to the request for taxpayer funding.

I really hope this is untrue because if it isn’t then it all but confirms the suspicions of many that virtually every matter on the order paper is cut and dried beforehand – hence the absence at almost every sitting of the last 18 months of any meaningful discussion or debate.

If there is substance in what I have heard then the conseillers have done themselves no favours at all. A legislature is by definition a debating chamber and if matters are to be pulled at the first sign of a measure of opposition then the public interest is not being served.

The proposal’s proponents deserve the opportunity to make their case just as opponents have a right to publicly oppose. If the decision to pull the proposition wasn’t taken for the reason I’ve outlined, then it begs the question as to what the matter was doing on the agenda in the first place.

l The email address for comment is fallesark@sark.net.