As every year in the run-up to the Annual General Meeting (to which everyone in Skerries is invited!), the chair and the committees of the Skerries Community Association look back on the past twelve months.
We have put together reports and photographs, which will be delivered to households in Skerries over the next week or so.
It will also be available in our community centre, in Skerries Library, Skerries Mills, and in some of the local supermarkets.
And we are also publishing it here (below), for your convenience.
Will we see you at the AGM? It will take place on Thursday 15 June from 8 pm in the Little Theatre, Old Schoolhouse, Skerries Community Centre. There will be refreshments!
Click on the link below if you’d like to see the full PDF.
Cycle or walk with us for better active travel conditions in Skerries!After a summer of monthly evening cycles, now it’s time for the big one:
Join us for the SkerriesLight Up Your BikeCycle and Walk on Thursday 22 September to mark the launch of Fingal County Council’s Skerries Active Travel Consultation, as well as European Mobility Week.Early Option: Come to Barnageeragh Monument (close to the coast road, near the apartments) at 7 pm if you’d like to join us for a coastal walk / slow coastal cycle. At the White Cottages, the walkers will continue up Balbriggan Street and turn right into Dublin Road, then left up Martine Court / Millhill Park to Skerries Mills. The cyclists will take a longer route and meet them there at 7.30.
7.30 Option: You can join the growing group of cyclists and walkers at Skerries Mill Car Park at 7.30 pm for the main cycle / walk.The walkers will head across the playing fields and towards the Catholic Church to Floraville, while those on wheels will take the long way round to Floraville, where we will all assemble at about 7.45 pm for a final walk / cycle around the triangle of Strand Street, Thomas Hand Street and Church Street. Let’s make ourselves as brightly lit up as possible, with bicycle bells in good working order, to create a lively presence!
All children must be accompanied by an adult who will be responsible for them during the event.
Background: Earlier that Thursday, 22nd September, the Active Travel Feasibility Study for Skerries will be officially launched in Floraville Park from 12 noon to 4 p.m. Drop by during the day if you can!
The public consultation will run for six weeks from then. This will include face to face interviews and surveys (using paper forms as well as online). Everyone will be invited to give their views on how they would like to be able to move around Skerries, whether on foot, on bicycles and tricycles, mobility scooters, skates, private car, go-car, community car as well as taxis and public transport.
There will also be workshops aimed different stakeholder groups including school goers and older residents. Look out for more information in our next blogpost! So we hope to see many of you on Thursday night, 7 pm at the Barnageeragh Monument or 7.30 pm at the Skerries Mills Car Park / 7.45 pm Floraville Park. Let’s light up our streets and show how much support there is for active travel in Skerries!
Jane Landy, Chairperson, Skerries Community Association, and Máire Jones, Jim Quigley Volunteer of the Year 2022 (Photo: John Coleman, SCA)
Every year, the Skerries Community Association (SCA) awards the Jim Quigley Volunteer of the Year title to a group or an individual.
In doing so, the SCA honours the memory of the late Jim Quigley – a man who, like so many of us, was a “blow-in.” He and his wife Brigid came to Skerries in the 1970s. He volunteered in his local Residents Group and from there was drawn to the Skerries Development and Community Association, where his involvement lasted 22 years, ten of them as Chairperson. Perhaps the most visible legacy of his work in Skerries is the Community Centre, which opened in December 1982. You can read more about him on the SCA website.
Brigid Quigley at the 2022 Award Ceremony. Photo: John Coleman, SCA
This year, the award was made at a particularly fitting and festive occasion – in the context of the Skerries Community Centre 40 Year Celebrations (7 August 2022), and in the presence of Jim’s widow, Brigid. To great applause, SCA chairperson Jane Landy introduced the winner, and Brigid Quigley handed the award to Máire Jones.
Máire at the 2022 Skerries Water Safety Week (photo: Skerries Water Safety on Facebook)
The judges chose her in recognition of the range of her volunteering activities. She is a long-time volunteer with Skerries Water Safety (the winners of the Jim Quigley Award in 2017, by the way), she maintains the Skerries Community Association website, she is a founder member of Skerries Walking Club, she is one of the more active volunteers with the Skerries Community Garden, she is a Skerries Community Car Volunteer Driver, a Skerries Cycling Without Age Volunteer Pilot, and the Skerries Neighbourhoods WhatsApp Group contact person for The Haven. This year she has also been involved in supporting refugees from the Ukraine who have come to Skerries.
Can you begin to see why the judge picked her out of a very strong field of nominees? Congratulations Máire! Well deserved.
Michael McKenna, Secretary, Skerries Community Association
Every year, Skerries Community Association awards a prize to an individual or a group of volunteers in appreciation of volunteering work they have done for Skerries.
Your nominee can be a young person, an adult, or a group – the only thing that matters is that they are deserving prize winners!
Please submit your nomination and supporting text with the reasons why you would like this person/group to get the award so that the judges will be in a position to make a fair decision. Please bear in mind that the judge has to make his evaluation on the information in your nomination so don’t hold back on detailing the reasons and citing evidence of your nominee’s work and achievements.
He was a champion of community development; a larger than life personality who was a dreamer and a doer; an idealist and an activist. Jim was born in 1942 and grew up in Toomevara, County Tipperary. He attended school firstly in Nenagh and then Mungret College, Limerick. After moving to Dublin he worked initially in the bar trade and subsequently in sales with Eir (then Telecom Eireann). In 1970, Jim married Brigid Carolan and shortly afterwards the couple came to live in Skerries, purchasing their home in the newly built Hillside Estate. He started up the residents’ association there and joined the SCA. He drove the huge community effort needed to get the Community Centre funded and built and was for many years chairperson of the Association.
Affiliated to Muintir na Tíre, registered charity CHY 6865. skerriesca.com. info@skerriesca.com Registered Offices: Skerries Community Centre, Dublin Road, Skerries Co. Dublin
SCA Chair Jane Landy writes: Back in the chair plus arrivals and departures
It’s less than a year since our last AGM (4 October 2021) and Skerries and the world seem to be very different. An end to all Covid restrictions since March 2022 has meant that those committees who rely on holding in-person events have been able to get back to business. Back in September who would have thought that we would be welcoming people fleeing from war-torn Ukraine to our town? (See skerriesca.com/Ukraine for more.) And I find myself (an SCA old-timer) “back in the chair”, which is as enjoyable and fulfilling as ever!