Skerries Community Association Accounts 2020

For information about the AGM on 4th October 2021, and the report for 2020/21 go to AGM 2021: The 2020/21 Report

AGM 2021: The 2020/21 Report

This year, the annual report about the work of the Skerries Community Association and its committees will not be distributed to every household in Skerries. A limited number of printed copies will be available in the Community Centre, in local shops, in the week before the AGM (4th October 2021) and on request by email to chair@skerriesca.com.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the full report with turnable pages.

Skerries Community Association & Committees 2020/21 Report

And if you’d like the links to be clickable, open the PDF here:

Jim Quigley Award 2021

Recognition of couple’s volunteering contribution to Skerries life.

On Saturday 9 October 2021 Skerries Community Association (SCA) and Skerries Town Football Club jointly recognised the immense contribution of Michael (Mick) and Noeleen Bolger to community sporting activity in the town. The occasion was the presentation of the Jim Quigley award for volunteer of the year and it took place in the grounds of Skerries Town FC after the weekly Kids Academy coaching session.

Every year SCA invites nominations from residents for the Jim Quigley Award which are then passed to independent judges for assessment.

This year the Judges selected Mick and Noeleen as the winners of the Jim Quigley Award for their years of dedicated work with Skerries Town Football Club. In their written comments, the judges said, “running Saturday morning coaching sessions (the Kids Academy) for up to ninety under-tens for seven months of the year is not an easy task. To do this for eighteen years coupled with involvement with other sporting and community activities including the Community Games at Mosney and the Special Olympics at Croke Park in 2003 requires dedication and commitment second to none.”

Mick and Noeleen set up the ‘ Kid’s Academy” on Saturday mornings with Skerries Town Football Club in September 2003 to provide coaching in basic football skills for five to nine year olds. They felt that children in the early years of their football life need an environment of non-competitive football to learn the basic skills. The Kid’s Academy, or KA as its better known provides such an environment.

The judges remarked that the real winner is the community of Skerries who get such wonderful benefit from the work done by people like Michael and Noeleen.

Accepting the award, Mick said that many others are and were involved in making the Kids Academy a success.

Michael McKenna presented the Jim Quigley award on behalf of the SCA and Owen O’Brien, Chairperson Skerries Town F.C. made a presentation of flowers and champagne on behalf of the club to Mick and Noeleen.

Jim Quigley 2021 Award Winners Michael (Mick) and Noeleen Bolger, with Michael McKenna (SCA) and Owen O'Brien Skerries Town Football Club
Jim Quigley Award Winners 2021 Michael (Mick) and Noeleen Bolger with Michael McKenna (SCA) and Owen O’Brien, Chairperson, Skerries Town Football Club.

AGM 2020: The 2019/20 Report

This year, the annual report about the work of the Skerries Community Association and its committees will not be distributed to every household in Skerries. A limited number of printed copies will be available from 10/10/2020 in the Community Centre, in local shops, and on request by email to chair@skerriesca.com.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the full report with turnable pages.

SCA and Committees: Our 2019/20 Report

And if you’d like the links to be clickable, open the PDF here:

Adopt a newly planted tree! 🌳

Just like new residents, new trees want to put down roots!

Many new trees have been planted throughout Skerries this year. And they need our help! It has not been raining much, and the forecast indicates very little rain on the way.

Earlier this year we saw many newly planted trees appear in the new housing estates (Ballygossan, Barnageeragh, Hamilton Hill) and alongside what are now known as Barnageeragh Road (previously the Distributor Road) and Harrison Cove Road (previously Northcliffe Heights). There are also some recently planted trees near Prosper Fingal that need watering.

It’s great to have lots of trees but they all need minding, especially in the first year.

Fingal County Council tell us that in more normal times they would always water newly planted trees over the first two summers after planting.  Regrettably the Council  is not in a position to carry out watering at this time as it is not a work task that can be done on the scale required while maintaining the recommended physical distancing.

These are very unusual times and Skerries must look to the great volunteering spirit of its residents to help.  If we can water the new trees outside, or near our homes we can save these trees, but it must be done in a way that keeps people safe.

Let’s adopt a tree!

tree being watered

Give one of the newly planted trees some water (at least 5l at a time, ideally 1.5 gallons) every second day. You could, for instance, fill an empty large water container (or 2-3 two-litre bottles), put them in your backpack and bring them with you when out on your walk, then water a tree that seems to not have been watered yet by another adopter. Let’s keep our trees healthy! But keep ourselves healthy too, by keeping our distance.

Good to see that residents in Barnageeragh Cove have got the ball rolling on this as have residents in the town centre and a number of individual tree water bearers around the estates.

Skerries Community Association

Skerries Tidy Towns

Sustainable Skerries

The Skerries Tree Preservation Group

Two Tree Talks in Skerries on 12 March 2020

Skerries welcomes Éanna Ní Lamhna (The Tree Council) & Kevin Halpenny (Fingal County Council) for a Tree- and Biodiversity- Focused Evening

About this Event

Are you interested in trees and how they can contribute to life and biodiversity in our town?

On Thursday 12 March, at 8 p.m. sharp (doors open at 7.40), in the Little Theatre, well-known environmentalist and media personality Éanna Ní Lamhna (Vice Chair of The Tree Council) will talk about “The Importance of Trees” – followed by a presentation by Fingal County Council’s Parks Superintendent Kevin Halpenny.

Kevin is in charge of the current review of Fingal’s Tree Strategy and will be talking about “Biodiversity and the Draft Fingal Tree Strategy.”

After the two presentations, there will be time for discussion and questions and answers. 

This promises to be a very interesting evening. It is organised by a number of groups with an active interest in trees in Skerries: The Skerries Community Association, Skerries Tidy Towns, Crann Padraig, and Sustainable Skerries. The organisers hope it will inform significantly their input into the draft Tree Strategy, which is currently being drawn up.

Wheelchair/Mobility Scooter Accessibility Survey

Skerries Tidy Towns are looking to making the town as accessible as possible and would be very grateful if any Wheelchair/Mobility Scooter users and people with limited mobility could complete a survey on accessibility in Skerries. They would also be grateful for any suggestions from people where the town can be improved.

Wheelchair/mobility scooter accessibility survey

You can send the completed survey to mclarecarter@aol.com.

No Excuse For Single Use!

Skerries Tidy Towns will launch their reusable cups in Super Valu Skerries on Tuesday, December 12th, at 2pm. Thanks to James and Super Valu for hosting the launch.

The 12 oz cup comes in four colours. It is made of naturally organic, rapidly renewable bamboo fibre. The lid and sleeve are made of silicone, which is BPA and phthalate free. The cup itself is dishwasher safe, naturally sterile – no taste residue – and should last for years. But when it has come to the end of its natural life, it goes back to nature along with organic compost.

The cups will retail at €9.99 and will be available in Super Valu, Gerry’s, Goat in the Boat, Skerries Mills, C&T’s, Skerries News, Olive, LA Bakery and Gerry at the station.

There will be a free coffee to go when you buy a cup on the day.

Have you seen Himalayan Balsam?

Himalayan Balsam is a pretty pink plant that was first introduced to Ireland as a garden plant, but it soon found its way out of gardens and into the countryside, where it has been spreading rapidly ever since.

In Fingal, its spread seems to be limited to two sites in Skerries, and the Skerries Tidy Towns group and Fingal County Council are keen to eradicate this invasive species.

The plant is an annual with scented, purplish-pink, slipper shaped flowers in June–August. When the large green seed pods are mature they explode when touched, scattering the seed far and wide to start new infestations next year. The seeds float and are spread further by water movements.

 

If you have seen Himalayan Balsam around Skerries when out and about, please let us know. To report Himalayan Balsam locations please email your sightings to biodiversity@fingal.ie

Please try to provide a map or a precise location with reference to the proximity of local features.

Skerries – the overall winner of the 2016 Tidy Towns competition!

Skerries is a fantastic place to live in – and it’s now officially the top Tidy Town in Ireland! Well done to Skerries Tidy Towns Committee.

The winning team back in Skerries

Photograph by Ray Watts, Skerries

The chair of Skerries Community Association, Geoff McEvoy, said on the day:
“I know I speak for the whole board when I express how delighted we are for Ann, Maeve, Mary and the whole Tidy Towns team. An award like this is the product of years of hard work by the committee and an army of volunteers. Skerries is lucky to have them!”
Indeed.

For links to some of the major coverage of this fantastic news item, go to the very bottom of this post.

A lot of work has gone into making Skerries an ever-better place for us locals and visitors alike. It’s not just the weekly work parties… you can read about the work this very active committee is doing on their dedicated page here on our Skerries Community Association website (they are, after all, one of our many committees).

A considerable amount of research, planning, and reporting is involved as well.

The Tidy Towns Committee this year focused on the Winning Value of Water – this is a piece by Mary Conway (you can see her on the above picture, fourth from right) that significantly contributed to the win.

The value of Water

Skerries is a seaside town which lies approx 25 kilometres north of Dublin City. It has two beaches, a harbour and a restored windmill and watermill. It has a long association with the sea. In previous times the residents depended on fishing for a livelihood. In recent times the population of Skerries has increased five fold and now stands just short ten thousand people. Luckily there is a very good community spirit in the town and enthusiasm for conserving energy in general and especially water as you will see from some of the projects below.

Floraville Community Garden in the Town Centre.

The new Community Garden provided under auspices of the Chamber of Commerce. This garden was designed in strict accordance with the recommendations of the Greater Dublin Strategic Drainage Study and other regulatory guidelines of Fingal County Council and the Department of Environment. This includes collection of rainwater falling onto all pavements and hard standing areas, its attenuation and ultimately its infiltration into the ground.
In addition, it was decided to implement a rainwater harvesting strategy and thereby minimise the amount of water that would be required from the public mains service. This was done by using a shallow underground 3000 litre F-Line rainwater harvesting tank and system so that this amount of water would be available for watering the garden. The system includes a state of the art automatic pumping system to provide the desired gardening water pressure while at the same time minimises power usage to operational periods only. The pump goes into hibernation mode at all other times. Water from this source is used by volunteers who maintain the flower planters around the town.

SKERRIES ALLOTTMENTS

From the outset the allotment holders wanted to be off-grid, i.e. not connected to mains electricity or water. There’s a stream running through the middle of the allotment fields from where we get our water. It’s pumped from this stream to
a 70,000 liter tank at the highest point of the scheme. From this tank, water troughs around the allotments are fed by gravity flow.
There are about 50 such troughs situated so that from any allotment you shouldn’t have to walk more that 10 meters to get water. 

Troughs were deliberately chosen as opposed to standpipes as it was felt that with standpipes, people might use hoses and be more wasteful of water. In addition to this many of the allotment holders have water butts and collect rainwater from shed roofs.

The Skerries allotments group held an open morning to encourage new people to become involved in the allotment community. They set up a sustainable watering system using the existing scheme with a solar pump which pumps water to a large container which is then gravity fed to troughs at various locations in the field.

As to quantities of water saved, I suppose of a hot summers day, an average allotment holder would use 30-40 liters of water on my allotment. There are about 250 allotments so, potentially, that could be 10,000 liters/day that would otherwise have come from the mains. Off course this depends on the weather, whether or not there’s a poly-tunnel, etc. Fingal County Council and the Fingal Leader Partnership did help financially to get started. Increased use of natural mulching and waterbutts in continuously encouraged.

COMMUNITY FOOD GARDEN

This year a site for the community garden has been secured and a Committee are looking at the ways of saving water and they are receiving the co-operation of the allotments group.
Already they have a 1000 litre tank to harness the rainwater from the roof of the wind/watermill. There is consideration being given to the idea of using the stream beside the watermill to draw water using a solar panel and then collect it in a tank. As this project progresses more consideration will be given to rainwater collection and the use of the stream.

Being a member of Skerries Tidy Towns for many years and involved in other community groups I was very impressed with the amount of planning this group has done in short while and have no doubt but it will be successful.

School Survey

A survey was carried out in the schools about the amount of water saved in homes.
Water/energy conservation publicity in Skerries News
The Tidy Towns Committee arrange with the local News publication to publish a number of abbreviated helpful hints on energy saving from Green homes covering waste reduction, water conservation, energy saving in the home, reducing carbon emissions and tips for recycling. A cartoon character called TiTo was commissioned specially to highlight these tips. Tidy Towns and Skerries Community Association Facebook and websites are used regularly.

Skerries is so lucky to be close to the sea as it provided much enjoyment for the residents. There is a sailing club, rowing club and a surf board group. These clubs provide much needed training for its members. Let us not forget the daily swimmers all year round. There is a safe swimming place on the head which has a area suitable for wheelchairs.

There is great awareness of the power and dangers of the water. A huge number of children are trained to a high level in general water safety every year.
Despite the high level of water sports enjoyed by the people of Skerries the sea took its toll on the fishing people. Last year Community got together and erected a memorial of all the fishermen and other sea users that lost their lives off Skerries.

Mary Conway
Skerries Tidy Towns

Skerries Tidy Towns Win In The News