Group of Cork growers facing loss of allotment under housing plan appeal to council for new site
At this month’s meeting of the Bandon-Kinsale Municipal District a Cork County Council official said that the local authority reviewed the project programme and has now confirmed that the lease on the land will be extended by another year until the end of December 2027.“This position has been conveyed to the Housing Agency. The revised timeline is fixed, and it is not anticipated that any further extensions will be granted, but it will allow the group, and I'm happy to work with the group, to identify any potential opportunities down the line, either on Cork County Council land or on private land,” Brian Dunne said.Cllr Ann Bambury welcomed the news, saying: “I am delighted that their imminent departure is not happening and that there's an extension. Allotments and gardens should be recognised as essential social and climate infrastructure at town and residential level. We're building houses but we're not building communities and we need that social infrastructure to align now as well.”“The possibility of finding land elsewhere to facilitate them I think would be a huge investment in our community."They're doing a lot of intergenerational work with the community hospital nearby and also being close to the town is very, very important for them. I've been up there numerous times and it's a fantastic facility and loads of other people are wanting to get involved,” she said.The Bandon Community Allotments group has been operating for the past sixteen years, with the last six spent on the current site. The group’s chairperson, Adrienne Murphy, said they’re relieved by the year’s extension and hope that a couple of acres on another site can be found to accommodate them.“We are very aware that the housing has to go ahead. We're not against housing, but we would love if the allotments were incorporated into the plans,” she told the Irish Independent.Ms Murphy said the allotments provide somewhere to garden for a wide range of people, including pensioners and apartment dwellers. “We have a very mixed group up there. We have a lot of non-nationals, a lot of them live in apartments. They don't have access to gardens and so it has to be walking distance from the town because not everybody has a car. The whole point of a community allotment is that people can walk to it.”“We're devastated that we've been asked to move and we expect the council to find us a premises. They said they would. We're going to fight it as best we can, we have all the councillors behind us. We are hopeful because we have a very good case in relation to what's happening at the moment. There's a lot of profile on allotments at the moment nationally, we don't have enough of them.”“And we're really stuck for green spaces in Bandon. The amount of building of houses is just phenomenal here at the moment, it’s on both sides of the town. And we actually have no infrastructure, no green spaces at all in the town,” she said.Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
