It’s been another incredibly busy 12 months for all of us at Community Gardens Ireland! All committee members of Community Gardens Ireland are volunteers who work together to progress the need for more allotments and community gardens throughout the island of Ireland.

Here are some of the highlights: 

1) School gardens, allotments, and community gardens ignored in the programme for government

We started 2025 with disappointing news that school gardens, allotments and community gardens had been ignored in the programme for government, and had been removed compared to the previous programme for government. 

This was following extensive work completed by Community Gardens Ireland through our GROW2030 General Election manifesto, which called for all communities to have a space to grow by 2030. We highlighted how Ireland has one of the lowest number of allotments and community gardens in Europe, and how all political parties and governments need to do more to provide these spaces.

2) Storm Éowyn – Damage to Community Facilities

In January, Storm Éowyn caused a huge amount of damage and devastation to people’s homes, businesses and communities throughout Ireland, and particularly along the west and north coast. 

Community Gardens Ireland were contacted by the Donegal Community Garden Network about communities who have suffered significant damage to their local community garden following the storm. It can take years and an incredible amount of local work to establish a community garden, and the loss can be devastating to the local community.

Community Gardens Ireland then made submissions to government seeking for funding to be made available to support communities which had been impacted by storm damage. 

3) AGM & Spring Virtual Gathering, April 2025

On Saturday 26th April 2025, we were delighted to hold our online Spring Gathering! This is an event that takes place each spring and is the fourth year of this event and marks the first event we have organised in 2025.

This event was made possible by a grant from Community Foundation for Ireland, and this event marks the first event to bring networks together from all over the island of Ireland.

The theme for 2025 was Growing Community – we’re stronger together through regional networks, local supports and national representation and we were delighted to hear from existing networks of community growers from across Ireland.

The event started with an introduction by Co-Chairs Molly Garvey and Dónal McCormack. Following this introduction, a letter from President Michael D Higgins was read out at the Community Gardens Ireland Spring Gathering to all attendees. Community Gardens Ireland committee wish to thank President Higgins for giving the time to issue this letter.

More details about the event is here: https://cgireland.org/report-of-our-spring-gathering-26th-april-2025/ 

4) Minister urged to reissue community gardens survey to local authorities after lack of engagement

In May 2025, Community Gardens Ireland received the results to a survey organised by the government of local authorities. Only 16 of 31 local authorities responded to the survey, with no local authority in Dublin completing the survey. 

We wrote to government ministers requesting the survey to be reissued. 

More details about this, including the survey response is here: https://cgireland.org/press-release-minister-urged-to-reissue-community-gardens-survey-to-local-authorities-after-lack-of-engagement/ 

5) Community Gardens Ireland Celebrates a National First: Carlow County Council Launches Dedicated Policy and Handbook

Community Gardens Ireland is proud to mark a landmark achievement for the movement. In May 2025, Carlow County Council became the first local authority in the Republic of Ireland to officially launch a dedicated Community Garden & Allotment Policy, accompanied by a practical Handbook for community groups.

This pioneering framework affirms the value of community growing spaces in local development, climate action, and public health. It sets a replicable model for other councils across Ireland—demonstrating how local authorities can support community-led environmental initiatives in a structured, inclusive, and sustainable way.

More details to the policy is here: https://cgireland.org/carlow-community-garden-policy-launch/ 

6) Community Gardens Ireland at Bloom 2025

CGI presented twice at Bord Bia Bloom 2025 Garden Stage Thursday 20th May and Sunday 1st of June,  10:15 . We were delighted to speak with  Fiann Ó Nualláin, The Holistic Gardener, to a crowd of 50 people each time. 

There were community gardeners present in the crowd from many counties and the questions were flying. 

Thursday 20th May and Sunday 1st of June,  10:15 Fiann Ó Nualláin, The Holistic Gardener in conversation with Community Gardens Ireland with Molly Garvey and Jenny Lyons.

Jennifer Lyons, Committee Member, Community Gardens Ireland 2025-2026.

Molly Garvey, Community Gardens Ireland 2025-2026, speaking with Fiann Ó Nualláin.

7) President Higgins’ Garden Party, 26th June 2025

Maeve Foreman, Jennifer Lyons, Dónal McCormack, President Michael D. Higgins, Molly Garvey and Miren-Maialen Samper Arias. 

Community Gardens Ireland was honoured to attend the President’s garden party in the beautiful venue of Áras an Uachtaráin on Thursday 26th of June 2025. Molly Garvey, Miren Maialen Samper, Jenny Lyons, Maeve Foreman, and Dónal McCormack attended on behalf of Community Gardens Ireland.

The garden party was organised to celebrate community groups and organisations throughout Ireland that are taking actions to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development goals.

More details are available here: https://cgireland.org/president-higgins-garden-party-26th-june-2025/ 

8) Community Gardens Ireland at Global Green, Electric Picnic 2025! 

Community Gardens Ireland was proud to celebrate ten years of CGI at Global Green, Electric Picnic 2025, with an unforgettable weekend of creativity, collaboration, and community spirit.

At the heart of the space was a truly co-created community garden oasis, brought to life through the vision and hands-on energy of Dee Sewell and Ian, alongside a dedicated build and set-up crew, thanks Paul, Liz, Ellie, Maeve, Ian and Dee, who worked throughout Wednesday and Thursday to create a vibrant, welcoming corner within Global Green. In the months leading up to the festival, Meghan and the SOS Gardeners lovingly grew and cared for many of the plants, without whom the space simply wouldn’t have become the beautiful, living garden it was.

More details available in a post to be made available shortly!

9) National Community Gardens and Allotments Week! 

We were excited to celebrate the third national Community Gardens and Allotments Week from 11th – 18th October 2025!

We ran this event to raise awareness of allotments and community gardens, to highlight how important they are and to detail the huge benefits of community gardening for communities, individuals, biodiversity and the local environment. 

The 2025 theme was “Growing Together” and we saw allotments, community gardens, school gardens, tidy towns and local growers in Ireland get involved. 

The week was officially launched by Deputy Lord Mayor of Galway, Cllr. Alan Cheevers, at Community Gardens Ireland’s annual Autumn gathering, in Ballybane Community Resource Centre in Galway (https://cgireland.org/galway-launch-community-gardens-week-2025/). 

Thanks to Faozia Moqbel of Galway City Partnership and Let’s Get Galway Growing for hosting us, and to Ballybane and Merlin Woods Community Gardens for facilitating hugely informative and enjoyable tours of their gardens as part of the Autumn Gathering.

10) Feeding Ourselves October 2025

Feeding Ourselves COP brought together multiple stakeholders, activists, and researchers at Trinity College Dublin, supported by Healthy Trinity and the TCD School of Medicine. 

It was an incredibly inspiring event, where community gardens had a strong representation, with Maeve Foreman & Dee Sewell speaking during the “voices from the field” section, and committee members Miren Maielen and Jennifer Lyons in attendance. You can see CGI’s contribution captured graphically at the bottom right of the graphic recording by artist Eimear McNally.

The IEN winter conference in the Midlands Park Hotel on 7th of December was a great opportunity for CGI to contribute to shaping the direction that the IEN might take as they formulate their strategy for the next few years. CGI advocated for a changed membership structure that would allow organisations like CGI to join. It was an excellent opportunity for networking, with a structured yet fun approach using a contacts bingo card to win prizes (Manchan Magan’s books among the prizes, a bittersweet tribute). 

CGI contributed to the Tree of Achievement where organisations added leaves of their contributions, ours detailing our commitment to the National community gardens and allotments week, and to the inclusion of Community Gardens in the Planning and Development Bill.

11) Consultations & Presentations Contributed to in 2025

Community Gardens Ireland have a history of contributing positively to public consultations by making well researched and considered submissions. Since 2021, we have made over 100 and some of our submissions in 2025 include the following:

• Bloom 2025 presentations
• Electric Picnic presentations
• Pre-budget submissions to parties for Budget 2026 
• President of the Council Submission, December 2025
• Numerous press releases on the planning and development act 2024
• All-Ireland Pollinator Plan Yearly Supporter Review
• SDG Champions Application 2025
• Submission to the Successor to the Roadmap for Social Inclusion Consultation 
• Presentation to Wicklow County Council on Community Gardens Ireland, April 2025 
• Submission to the UN CFS Policy Recommendations on Strengthening Urban and Peri-urban food systems
• Presentation by Miren Maialen Samper to the Irish Cycling Campaign on 22^nd November 2025 about Community Gardens Cycle as part of the Biodiversity Week Bike Week
• Various Parliamentary Questions in relation to promised guidance document to be issued for allotments and community gardens in Ireland

12) Radio, TV & Newspaper Publicity

In 2025 we were successful in getting a number of press releases printed in local and national media and interviews on the radio. The following are a list of our press releases and actions printed in the media / on the radio in 2025:

• ‘They’re lifelines’: How community gardens boost mental health and social inclusion, Irish Times, December 2025
• Boost for allotments as community gardens recognised in Irish law for the first time, November 2025
• Community Gardens Take Centre Stage in Galway Launch, WeathÉire, October 2025
• Local authorities are now obliged to support community gardens, Changing Ireland, July 2025
• Donal Hickey: More allotments wanted — there’s a 2-3 year waiting list in Cork, June 2025 
• President Higgins at Bloom 2025, May 2025: “The recent formalisation of the role and value of community gardens was a most welcome development. Community gardens speak to our most humane instincts, to nurture, to cooperate for the common good, and to live in a respectful relationship with nature and with one another. I greatly hope that this recent formalisation marks a turning point, a seed planted that, with care and commitment, can flourish into a landscape where such vital initiatives are supported and celebrated as they deserve to be.”
• Dáil debate on Biodiversity Week 2025, May 2025, Ciarán Ahern TD

13) Supporting new and existing gardens

Our team of volunteers continued to help supporting new and existing gardens by answering queries, helping to set up new gardens, providing support for existing gardens, information about school gardens, insurance details and sources of funding.

Direct Correspondence:

Our team of volunteers helped with queries or advice from all over the island of Ireland for the setting up of new gardens and help with existing community growing initiatives, with over 75 queries answered by the volunteer team here at Community Gardens Ireland, with Maeve Foreman providing a huge amount of support on these queries. These queries were by email, on our Facebook group, by Facebook messenger, or in person at our gatherings!

Map:

In 2025 a total of 21 gardens were added to our map. We now have over 250 gardens that have joined the CGI network and are now up on the CGI map on our website. We also helped promote new gardens on our social media that contacted us. Is your community growing space on our map yet?

Social Media:

Miren, Donal, Maeve are part of CGI media subgroup who posting on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

As part of the social media work, time is spent by the social media team engaging with our Community Gardens members as well as newly Community gardens that joined our map. The gardens are offered information and assistance via social media as well as making connections with other community gardens and groups and associations or local communities, as has always been our aim. This year our focus was to reconnect with our member gardens and catch up in greater depth than we have been. 

Sharing on our social media and doing collaborations and celebrating as well Community Gardens projects is helping us to focus on our core values and progress our work on the Sustainable Development Goals. It’s important to communicate the positive stories of all the community gardens and connect with all other community garden projects, promoting the accomplishments of each of the gardens.

Facebook – our Facebook page has grown to 5,400 followers, with there being 4,900 members on our Facebook group.

Twitter – our following on Twitter is at over 2,300 followers.

Instagram – we continued to grow our followers on Instagram and now have over 1,600 followers. This account was reactivated in 2023.

Website – we continued to see very strong visitor numbers to the CGI website with thousands of individual visitors clicking on cgireland.org in 2025! 

If you have a query, get in contact at info@cgireland.org or check out our Facebook and Twitter accounts!

14) CGI Affiliated Groups

We saw a huge number of community gardens organise events, welcome new members, and provide community support locally through 2025! Here are just some of these events: 

Community Garden Cycle in Dublin 2025, Dublin Community Growers

The Community Garden Cycle 2025 started at Mud Island Community Garden and finished at Killester Bloom Community Garden same day as Street Feast 2025

https://www.dublincycling.com/cycling/awesome-craic-community-gardens-cycle

Community Garden Winners at the Dublin City Neighbourhood Awards

The winners in the 2025 Dublin City Neighbourhood Awards for allotments and community gardens this year were De Courcey Square, Donaghmede Mens Shed, Fast Garden in Finglas, Chapelizod Allotments and Ringsend Irish Town Community Centre, Dublin City Farm and Ecology Centre, St. Annes Park, The Kingfisher Project and Glas Community Garden as well as Summer Row Community Garden. 

https://www.dublincity.ie/news/stoneybatter-pride-place-wins-years-big-prize-dublin-city-neighbourhood-awards

15) 2025/2026 committee members

Our amazing 2025/2026 committee are all volunteers and is as follows:

Co-Chair: Dónal McCormack

Co-Chair: Molly Garvey 

Secretary: Maeve Foreman

Treasurer: Orlaigh Sally

Ordinary Committee Member:

• Conor O’Kane
• Miren-Maialen Samper Arias
• Jenny Lyons
• Dee Sewell
• Ellie O’Donovan
• Maria Young
• Adrien O’Connor

New Ordinary Committee Members:

• Adam Calihman
• Niamh Gibbons
• Brenda Gough
• Faozia Moqbel

Thank you to our committee members for everything in 2025!

16) What’s next in 2025?

We will continue to work with the new government to push for guidance documents to be issued for allotments and community gardens, and for further improvements for a community growing law in Ireland. We will also work with other organisations to help pursue our goals.

We will be hosting an online gathering in early March/April 2026 – keep an eye on our social media for details about this!

Community Gardens Ireland is a purely volunteer-led organisation. If you are a community grower and want to get involved or want to find out more, get in contact at info@cgireland.org or check out our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Check out the Community Gardens map of Ireland – is your local garden on it? If not, see here to add it!

Posted on 15/01/26 – for errors/corrections/updates, email info@cgireland.org