EDITOR - I am writing as an environmental engineer, parent of two young primary school aged children, and a regular user of the Kinsale Community Orchard. My family has been attending camps and community days at the orchard with the Kinsale Forest Club since early 2025, and I have seen first hand the value of this space for children, families and the wider community.

The orchard is a rare haven of biodiversity in a semi urban setting. It is safe, accessible and uniquely suited to outdoor learning, particularly at a time when many similar spaces are on private land or difficult to access.

For my children, it has provided opportunities to learn through play, build confidence, develop practical skills, and form a meaningful connection with nature. These experiences are foundational to child development and are increasingly scarce.

It is therefore deeply disappointing that planning permission has been granted to develop this site further in order to extend existing sporting amenities. While sports facilities are important, this proposal risks eroding one of the few biodiversity rich community spaces in the area.

With a growing population and increasing awareness of the biodiversity crisis, we should be protecting and expanding places like the community orchard, not sacrificing them.

Kinsale has long been associated with the Transition Town movement and forward thinking approaches to sustainability. In that context, the loss or disturbance of the community orchard feels short sighted and out of step with current commitments to biodiversity and nature based learning.

I urge those with influence to revisit the proposal and consider alternative, more holistic options that allow the orchard to remain intact and complement other local amenities. Our community – and especially our children – deserve spaces that nurture both people and nature.

Grace O’Shea

(address with editor)

The Kinsale community orchard which campaigners are hoping to save.

Beds in sheds will hurt our most vulnerable

EDITOR -  Threshold, Age Action, and the Irish Council for International Students (ICOS) call on Government to halt proposed exemptions for garden homes until a full review of license arrangements is completed and basic protections for occupants are put in place.

Based on Threshold’s frontline experience, those who privately rent garden homes are often treated as ‘licensees’, with little to no tenancy security, no protection from rent increases and no recourse if issues arise. Licence arrangements are not covered by the protections of the Residential Tenancies Acts.

Threshold regularly sees cases of people living under license arrangements in poor quality, substandard, cramped accommodation.

The proposal to treat the income from these units as eligible for rent-a-room relief is particularly concerning. Threshold, ICOS, and Age Action believe this approach has the potential to negatively affect students, particularly international students, and older people who may be pressured by family members or third parties seeking to benefit from their property.

John-Mark McCafferty, Threshold CEO

President Connolly on right side of history

EDITOR -  Speaking at the Defence of Democracy conference in Barcelona alongside Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and Brazil’s Lula da Silva and others, President Connolly quoted ex-UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld.

She said: ‘The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.’

President Connolly added: ‘Ireland is uniquely placed to offer a valuable perspective as a neutral, post-famine, post-colonial republic’, and pleaded with leaders to take a stand against a growing wave of ‘might is right’.Her plea stands as a unique light in the darkness surrounding the continuing starvation, bombing and genocide in Palestine and now in Lebanon and elsewhere, as the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank and Iran continue unabated.

President Connolly’s stance contrasts with the Taoiseach’s disgraceful failure to make any similar statement or act to stop military flights through Shannon, his equal failure to press for the cancellation of the EU Israel special trade agreement, and failure to take the minimal step of passing the Occupied Territories Bill for over eight years.

If Spain can take these steps, why not Ireland?

Kevin T Finn,

Mitchelstown.

Large-scale housing too much too soon

EDITOR - I read that there has been approval for 246 new homes to be built in Clonakilty. People will argue they may be much needed, but my experience of the building of mass numbers of new homes on the outskirts of smallish towns in the UK has simply been the complete destruction of the communities here. The breakdown in civility and in law and order and the huge rise in shoplifting and obvious addictive behaviour is horrific. The sudden relocation of large numbers of folk cannot be accommodated by the resident population and incoming young people particularly who have no network of belonging often become bored and fractious.

If 246 houses are required they should be scattered and built over a period of many years so that incoming families can be made welcome and truly find their place in the community.

Your article does not mention a new GP surgery or dentist or new sewage works or reservoir provision. I imagine Clonakilty’s existing resources are being asked to stretch to fit this new development.

In the UK we have sadly found these things are not elastic at all.

Sophie O’Sullivan

Subscriber

(Address with editor).