East Meath needs community garden strategy - Meyer

Calls have been made for Meath County Council to create an allotment and community garden strategy for East Meath.

Sinn Fein Cllr Helen Meyer put forward a motion on the issue at a recent full council meeting stating that a similar project has been successful in Kildare. Meyer's motion received support from fellow councillors.

"There is strong public demand for this initiative," said Meyer.

This will foster food independence, enhance social networks, encourage community building and promote sustainable practice," she added.

"Kildare Co Council has actually done an initiative where they're going to manage it, they're going to give the land and they're going to give money towards it and so they're going to make sure that there's five of those done in the development plan.

"So I'd like to ask that this will be actually added to the county development plan coming up. I think the answer there, it doesn't meet what I'm looking for, which is actually for this to be part of the development plan managed the way it is.

"The Planning Bill is going to make home garden's smaller and we are going to get more and more of a need for these allotments so I think we need to have a strategy around this.

"If you look at what Kildare County Council have done, they've put a lot of work into this, and they did a survey on it. They got 1400 people responding saying, we want this. I don't think we need a survey. I think we know it's needed."

Cllr Meyer says that she is positive that a community garden initiative that she has been working on is going to get the green light on green space in an Ashbourne housing estate in the near future and hopes it will be the first of many in the county.

"The community is on board with it and everyone is really excited to hopefully see it get off the ground," said Meyer.

"There will be so many benefits to this and people of every age can get involved.

"New planning regulations allow for smaller gardens and less green space is required to be set aside. Along with that more and more apartments are being built so allotments are going to become more important for residents.

“The council needs to purposely plan for this with allocating land for this use which will encourage community building, food independence and sustainability."