Dónal’s plot to maintain children’s link with the land and their food

BLESSINGTON’S ALLOTMENT ACTIVIST DÓNAL MCCORMACK HAS A DEEP-ROOTED PASSION FOR SOLVING LOCAL ISSUES. HE TELLS REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF ABOUT HIS LATEST MISSION

IF you want to talk allotments and community gardens, then Dónal McCormack is your man. Just don’t look to him for tips on how to force your rhubarb or when is the best time of year to plant your pumpkins. While he is perfectly capable of discussing such matters, he makes no secret of the fact that he would rather be chatting about policy. Yes, policy.

His activism as a gardening enthusiast is not so much a product of the potting shed as an issue to be pursued in the council chamber and committee room. He has bent the ear not only of the general public in his adopted home of Blessington. He has also taken the fight to county councillors, public servants and national law makers. Yet, though he is blessed with the keen grasp of the detail essential in a policy nerd, he has not forgotten how to smile. And the 39-year-old contrives to make his policy points with an enthusiasm that is both lucid and infectious, not to mention obviously heartfelt.

He meets me with a gift he gives to many he meets, particularly schools – a strawberry plant. It is a very healthy looking strawberry plant in a neat plastic pot and it has grown a cluster of lovely white flowers, harbingers of the fruit harvest to come.

But this plant did not come from Dónal’s allotment. There is no allotment: “We haven’t got one. That is the problem,” says Dónal, leader of the Blessington Allotment Campaign.

The strawberry plant was produced, it turns out, in the confines of the very small McCormack family garden. The space available there for his horticultural activities is so limited that most of his cultivation is carried out in pots rather than in the ground. He would love to have more room to grow but there is no immediate prospect of such a luxury.

The seeds (ahem!) of his activism were sown young, raised in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham, where his parents encouraged him as a young chap to sow a few rows of carrots. He attended Coláiste Eanna where he sprinted on the athletics track. School led on to Trinity College where he pursued a course in engineering. That’s right, engineering rather than botany or agricultural science.

It was while at TCD that he took to serious activism, as a member of the students union. He rose through the ranks to be elected education officer, taking a year out from lectures to tackle the practical problems facing his 15,000 fellow students. Though it is no longer live online, he remains proud of the website (www.mygrant.ie) he devised to assist applicants seeking third level grants.

The grant system at the time was horribly disjointed, but he managed to point thousands of users of the site in the right direction. While in college, he met his wife-to-be Deirdre, who was similarly active in campus politics. Also imbued with the activism bug, she is well-known in Blessington these days for her swimming pool campaign and her face is currently on scores of roadside posters as she is running for a seat on the county council with the Social Democrats.

As a young graduate, Dónal was recruited by Jacob’s – not the biscuit people but an engineering consultant firm – who assisted in the running of the Dublin Port tunnel. He later worked directly for the tunnel administrators before a brief spell in confectionery with Cadbury’s in Coolock.

He eventually came to roost at the former Kodak site in Newbridge, a 120-acre outpost of the worldwide Pfizer empire. He has been on the pharma giant’s payroll since 2016.

Around the same time, he and Deirdre moved to Blessington, arriving in town when daughter Tara was just six weeks old, to be followed in due course by Malachí (5) and Oonagh (3). Their father loves the neighbourhood in the western suburbs, but no one would describe their garden as large. This restricted space is frustrating since he soon developed an ambition to have the children familiar with the link between growing plants and eating food.

The front yard was quickly populated by a host of pots in which he cultivates the strawberries, which have become his calling card, as well as peas and a variety of other vegetables.

Meanwhile, out in the back, there is room enough for some neat apple trees and a riot of raspberry canes.

It was never going to be enough and a fuse was lit when a friend mentioned to Dónal that he had taken on an allotment in Leixlip. In May of 2018 a request to Wicklow County Council for similar was met with an apologetic negative: “They said they didn’t have any.” He nonetheless took the initiative by calling a meeting in Blessington’s public library which drew at least 40 people and a full-scale campaign was soon under way.

He remains campaign chairman six years on, with Brigín Fenlon and Tina Dermody also on the committee.

While there are still, maddeningly, no allotments, their greatest achievement so far has been a schools programme, undertaken with county council backing.

Since starting in deepest Covid times with Educate Together principal Jonathan Kinsella (now retired) they have put plants or seeds into the hands of practically every child of primary school age in the area.

More than a thousand strawberry plants were distributed during this Edible Blessington initiative.

The search for growing space led to Dónal making contact with other like-minded folk in the Community Gardens Ireland (CGI) movement, of which he has served a term as chairman. The CGI has allowed him to give full vent to his activism and his love of policy initiatives.

The organisation has met national politicians and civil servants, lobbying to ensure that allotments or community gardens are included in future planning legislation.

The logic is simple: first, as we become more urbanised as a society, the link with the land should be maintained; second, as gardens become smaller – or non-existent in the case of apartment dwellers – those who want to grow should be given the opportunity.

Along the activist way, Dónal has discovered that allotments are by no means a new phenomenon. During The Emergency of the 1940s, citizens were enrolled by government in Sow for Security, a programme to allow people grow their own food.

The result was that many towns had what were called plots – Arklow alone had 200 of them.

However, the tradition waned and Wicklow is now one of eight counties in the Republic which have no local authority allotments. The splendid community gardens in Baltinglass are associated with the local parish rather than with local government.

Dónal reports proudly that his elder daughter hates frozen peas, preferring instead the taste of the peas which come fresh from the family’s own yard. He would love to have an allotment where the McCormacks could grow more of their own. In the past six years, there have been a couple of false dawns, potential sites identified in Blessington without coming to fruition. Either they have been built on or there were legal difficulties.

Nevertheless the search goes on and enthusiasts meet to swap plants and to exchange ideas, while scouring the State Land website in hopes of lighting on somewhere suitable to, literally, put down roots. Does anyone out there have an acre to spare, please?

HIS ELDER DAUGHTER HATES FROZEN PEAS, PREFERRING THE TASTE OF THE PEAS WHICH COME FROM THE FAMILY’S YARD