REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE COMMUNITY GARDENS PROJECT, CHERRY ORCHARD
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE RECENTLY DEVELOPED COMMUNITY GARDENS PROJECT, CHERRY ORCHARD, BALLYFERMOT
Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh inniu ar an ócáid mhór seo. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl daoibh as an gcuireadh agus as fáilte a bhí caoin, cneasta agus croíúil.
Thank you for your warm welcome and to Tom Collins, Chair of the Cherry Orchard Regeneration Board, for his kind invitation to the official opening of Cherry Orchard’s community gardens project.
Community gardens are fairly new to Ireland but you will find them in many cities around the world including New York, London and Berlin. However, I don’t imagine any of the others started with a ready-made name like Cherry Orchard. It is almost as if this area was always waiting for this development so that it could truly live up to its beautiful name.
So up to last April this was just a fairly dismal parcel of uncultivated land and then people went to work and five months later we can see the transformation into a lovely community space which puts nature right at the heart of the area. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling “Gardens are not made by sitting in the shade.” In other words they are not created by spectators but by people who roll their sleeves up and start digging. From the planning of the garden, through to clearing the land and planting the new landscape, there has been a massive community investment and now that powerful community effort has created a truly marvellous community resource that will never be the same two seasons or years in a row. There will be changes in colour, in wildlife, in weather. The place will mature in the coming years and it will give a lot of people a lot of pleasure. Sometimes it will be a place to come to be distracted from life’s ups and downs by the majesty and generosity of nature. Sometimes it will be a place just to meet friends or to be alone. Always though it will be a place to be proud of, a community that cares about its people enough to want them to have the beauty and serenity of a park close by.
We associate the spirit of the meitheal with rural Ireland and harvest time when neighbour helped neighbour bring in the hay, the turf and the crops. But here in Dublin that same spirit made this community garden and will keep on making it and remaking it for generations to come. That same spirit gave you a great Cherry Orchard Regeneration Festival back in July and I am sure there are many happy memories and pictures to recall those days of fun and friendship, family and community. That Festival and this garden did not happen by accident or coincidence but by people deciding they did not want to live as strangers among strangers but as friends and good neighbours whose shared effort and enthusiasm could make new things, good things happen. So to the army of volunteers who make community tick with the energy that makes gardens and festivals happen in spaces where nothing used to happen – a big thank you. Special thanks to the Regeneration Board for getting this project off the ground; to Dublin City Council for providing the land for the garden and for the development of future allotments; the VEC for providing tutors to help the gardeners; MAGIC, Cherry Orchard Men’s Club who carried out a lot of the heavy work in developing the gardens; the local youth organisations who have committed to the project and all the other community groups and the individuals who got stuck in and got their hands dirty to do the planting and the weeding. Between you all you have done a brilliant job and an inspiring job for anyone looking at this can only be impressed at what partnership can accomplish. This was no sixty minute makeover. You had to be patient, to plan, plant and wait for nature to take her course. Cherry Orchard’s new garden has seen its first summer and will soon have its first autumn, winter and spring. Each one of them will have a new story to tell, new images of plants that thrived and others that didn’t do so well, of birds that came and went, of people who visited and came away with their own unique experience. This garden is a very special gift that renews itself again and again. Enjoy it and nurture it so that it always flourishes exactly as you want your people and community to flourish.
Thank you.