Health and community-based projects will be top priorities for Debbie Coyle when she returns to Fermanagh and Omagh District Council.

As previously reported, Miss Coyle will replace Sinn Féin Councillor Siobhán Currie for the Erne North DEA.

Councillor Currie was elected in 2019, while Miss Coyle lost her seat in the Enniskillen ward at the same time.

However, she is set to return as a councillor, and has already been contacted by constituents with issues to deal with.

“I’m delighted to be going back on and honoured to have been asked and to have been selected,” said Miss Coyle.

Looking at issues she will focus on, she continued: “My priorities would be around health, health issues and obviously our hospital and services within our hospital, and making sure we can keep what’s there and build on what’s there, along with care in the community, which is shocking.

“We have people in hospital who need to and should be at home – only for a lack of community care, they can’t go home. Those kinds of issues are really important to me.”

She is also focused on community-based projects and work that Councillor Currie has been involved in during her three years in the Council.

“I’m a community activist in my own area. There are plenty of communities across Fermanagh, and in the area that I am going into, that there might be facilities needed.

“I know Siobhán started some really important work, and I have had calls already from Irvinestown around the condition of paths and disability access and things like that, so I will be on to the Roads Service around these issues, because accessibility is really important.”

And while she maybe would have been more accustomed to dealing with issues within Enniskillen when she was previously in the Council, she feels the inequalities in towns and rural areas are similar issues, and she wants to identify them and change things for the better.

Miss Coyle paid tribute to Councillor Currie, but knows she will be able to call on the experience of her friend when she needs when she returns to the Council.

She said: “She’s a big loss to the team, but we are friends and she’ll be there still in the background.”

The incoming councillor knows all too well the responsibilities of the role, but it is one that she is looking forward to.

“There’s a lot of responsibilities with it, but it is an extension of what I do in the community – to help people in the community and get things done.”