'It’s amazing for mental health': Cork community gardeners dig in as State loses plot

“It’s amazing just for mental health, and a sense of community,” she says. 

“I’m here as much as I can be, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And I’m here from day one when all the beds were being mapped out. It’s amazing to see how much it’s changed.” 

Togher Community Garden is one of 27 community gardens to have emerged in Cork in the past few years, particularly with the huge upsurge in interest in gardening that came during the covid pandemic.

The Togher garden has just been through its first full year in operation, and now boasts 18 large raised beds built by a local Men’s Shed, a large polytunnel complete with water collection system, and now, a vast pile of topsoil to be sieved and used for growing in new beds.

With spring just about springing, the pre-existing raised beds are mostly dormant, waiting for new seedlings and a new growing season. 

In some of them though, garlic and onions are snuggled into a mulch of raw sheep’s wool, which has been protecting them through the hard frosts.

Ms Rekaby is a retired chef, who last summer ran a four-week cooking course for local children where they harvested, prepared, cooked, and ate produce from the beds. 

For city-living kids, this insight into where food comes from was, for many, a first: “I was shocked because a lot of them didn’t know anything about how food grows,” she says.

The resulting Togher Community Garden Cookbook for children is now at the printers, illustrated by the garden’s artist-in-residence, Luna Fox.

This is just a sample of the smorgasbord of activities on offer at the garden. 

Today, a new 18m x 4m pond is being dug by volunteers to improve biodiversity. There’s a newly-planted hedgerow of native species. 

In April, there will be a day-long “bio blitz”, with events ranging from an insect safari to a talk with biologist and broadcaster Éanna Ní Lamhna.

Maria Young, who works for Cork Food Policy Council and Green Spaces For Health, is the co-ordinator at Togher Community Garden and consults and works on several other community-growing projects citywide.

She says there was a marked increase in interest in community growing during covid restrictions and that Cork City Council responded favourably, even phoning her when there was recent interest from residents to establish a new community garden in Gerry O’Sullivan Park on the northside.

“Pre-covid, had we looked for these spaces, we mightn’t have gotten them,” Ms Young says. 

“They see how they work now, and they see the benefits for the community.” 

Togher, like many city neighbourhoods, has its fair share of antisocial behaviour and vandalism. Ms Young was advised to gate the community garden and lock it at night, but she feels this is in opposition to the inclusive ethos of what the project is all about.

“People said we’d need to lock everything up but that’s pointless. People said we were mad to be putting up a glasshouse, even though it’s not glass, it’s polycarbonate.

"But it hasn’t happened — we haven’t had any vandalism so far. I think it’s because the day we put all the soil into the beds, we went door to door and we had about 80 people here. It’s theirs, and it’s always open for people to come over and say hello.

We worked with early school-leavers in that first year. We did eight weeks with them and there were about 10 of them. At the end of the eight weeks, they said, ‘nothing will happen to your garden’. 

"There was a group of young fellas who started slapping the polytunnel with hurleys once, but people responded very quickly and someone called the gardaí.” 

Most of the community gardens Ms Young works with are on public, council-owned land. So if the council wanted to put the land to a different use, what would a community garden like the one in Togher be able to do about it?

“Well, we’re completely dependent on the goodwill of the council,” she says. “We don’t have any security when you think about it that way. I’d be very surprised if they did something like that, but we don’t know what will happen down the line.” 

'Omission' from new planning bill 

Last week, Community Gardens Ireland (CGI) started highlighting an omission to the proposed new Planning and Development Bill 2022, which is currently making its way through the Dáil. 

All reference to allotments in an earlier bill had been removed.

The bill it seeks to replace, the Planning and Development Amendment Act 2010, defines allotments and provides for councils to reserve land for communities to grow their own food.

“This is a big risk to pretty much all 2,500 local authority allotments and community gardens throughout Ireland, ” Donal McCormack, chairperson of Community Gardens Ireland (CGI) tells the Irish Examiner.

When CGI discovered the omission, it launched an email campaign targeting lawmakers on the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Local Government, and Heritage, who are examining the draft bill.

The committee chair, Wicklow TD Steven Matthews, said in response that the omission of allotments from the draft bill was an oversight and invited CGI to make a submission to the Oireachtas committee.

“The wording we received is that it was an omission and that it will be rectified in the final bill,” Mr McCormack says. 

“It’s great to hear that there will be a fix, but what we need to work on now is what that fix will be.

We need people to contact their TDs and senators to make sure they are aware of the need for a strong community growing law. Where there’s demand there, local authorities must support community growing.” 

Of course, there are differences between traditional allotments, where land is let to individuals, and the growing number of community gardens, where everyone works on, and shares the bounty from, the same patch of land. There is no legal definition of community gardens as distinct from allotments in the 2010 planning act.

CGI will push not only to preserve the protections in the 2010 planning act but for stronger laws to protect the growing role of community gardens amidst a trend towards higher density urban living, Mr McCormack says.

“We want to ensure that what gets in is better wording that reflects the modern realities of community growing in Ireland, and also based on experience in other countries,” he says. 

"Unfortunately when you leave it up to the local authority level, you have some local authorities providing lots, and some providing none at all. This is why it has to be done on a Government level and it has to be legislated for.” 

Mr McCormack lives in Blessington, Co Wicklow, where he has been campaigning for the local authority to provide an allotment scheme for years, so far to no avail.

In Tramore, Co Waterford, a community group campaigning for allotments was shot down last autumn when the council refused to grant them planning permission for a change of use on industrially zoned land that the group said was otherwise perfect for their needs.

Eight Irish local authorities currently do not provide any community growing space at all.

Other EU countries often fare better in their protections.

In Scotland, local authorities are obliged to keep a waiting list for allotments and to provide land for them if there are more than 15 people on the waiting list.

In Denmark, which has a population roughly the same as Ireland’s, there are 40,000 allotments. Numerous EU countries have laws protecting the tenure of community growing spaces.

According to UCC food historian Regina Sexton, during the Irish response to food shortages in the Second World War, there was a local authority-led charge on allotment-growing based on an amendment to the Acquisition of Land Act of 1926.

By 1942, Cork City Council was operating 2,500 allotments of an eighth of an acre each for families to grow their own food, including at what was known as “the plots”, in Churchfield on the northside.

The number of allotments run by Cork’s local authority then is the same number of allotments in the whole of Ireland today.

Ballincollig Regional Park allotments 

In Ballincollig Regional Park, there are 81 allotments in a scheme that was founded in 2013 on land owned by Cork City Council. There is a two-year waiting list for plots on this publicly-owned scheme, and now there is also a new private allotment scheme, Greenfields, in the busy Cork suburb.

The chairperson of Ballincollig Regional Park Allotment Committee, Louis Kelleher, said the omission from the new planning bill was “ominous” and he feared that without continued legal protection, local authorities would not be compelled to provide maintenance for allotment schemes.

“The danger is that if the maintenance costs seem too high, a council could decide to close allotments and find an alternative use for the land,” Mr Kelleher said.

“We need legislation to protect community growing, and I’d love to see that legislation bolstered and extended, for example, to build a requirement for community gardens into the provision of green space on new estates.” 

Back at Togher Community Garden, Ms Young says she hopes to see a definition for community gardens included in any changes to the Planning and Development Bill currently being scrutinised.

“The difference between community gardens and allotments needs to go in there,” she says. 

“Allotments and community gardens work very differently and bring different benefits.

A lot of people come here and say, ‘can I have this bed and I’ll work on this?’ and we say no. All the beds are for all of us to work collectively on because there is a master plan of crop rotation throughout the beds.

"It also means it’s a great learning opportunity, where you can mix ages, mix cultures, mix abilities, and have people all working together on the same beds. And everyone can take food away at the end of it.

"It’s nice to have both options,” she says. 

“Allotments, where you work away on your own veg and turn the key at the end of the day, and then places like here, that are open to everyone.”