Ireland’s Greenest PlaceDingle Peninsula, Co Kerry
Tree Planting Alders on Dinny Galvin’s farm: Richard Creagh, Meitheal na gCrann, Dinny Galvin, farmer and Dingle Hub, and Peader Ó Fionnáin, chair Corca Dhuibhne Community Forum. Photograph: Valerie O’Sullivan
“It’s a wonderful view, and we don’t take it for granted,” says Gráinne Kelliher, gesturing towards Dingle’s harbour, colourful with boats, and the currently misty mountains that lie beyond. Kelliher and four others from the Dingle peninsula community – Deirdre de Bhailís, Dinny Galvin, Ann Ní Chíobháin and Martin Bealin – are in the Dingle Hub, on the outskirts of the town.
The five of them are explaining why they nominated their area for the Irish Times Greenest Places competition. As I take notes, it strikes me that the core of the work this community has been doing for the past few years can be summed up by the simple fact that they don’t take any of their peninsula’s considerable advantages for granted. Caring for their beautiful environment and creating imaginative ways to be more sustainable in the way people work and live there, is to acknowledge that the peninsula will be an improved place to be handed on to its next generation of residents and visitors.
This is why the Dingle Peninsula is the overall winner of the Irish Times Greenest Place competition, sponsored by Electric Ireland. The four category winners, for Ireland’s Greenest Suburb, Village, Town and Community, are, respectively: Dún Laoghaire in Co Dublin; Inagh in Co Clare; Skerries in Co Dublin; and the Dysart River Project in the midlands.
At the beginning of the summer, when the competition launched, we were not sure what kind of response we would get. The “we” were judges Eamon Ryan, former Green Party leader and former minister for the environment; Kevin O’Sullivan, Irish Times Environment and Science Editor; Mary Minihan, Irish Times Features Editor; Lisa Browne of Electric Ireland; and me.
As the entries came in, it became clear that there are scores of communities, large and small, throughout the country who are making all sorts of admirable efforts to introduce more thoughtful and sustainable ways of living, including scale-up of renewable energy.
For instance, many of the flower planters and hanging baskets that we have got used to seeing in public spaces are now planted only with pollinator-friendly flowers.
Some were small-scale initiatives, such as encouraging the use of reusable cups at local coffee shops, and receiving a discount on the coffee as encouragement. Some, like the excellent and important ongoing work being carried out to conserve the sand dunes at the Maharees in Co Kerry, were much bigger.
The commonality to all entries, whether a desire to reduce plastic waste, help and encourage older people to apply for solar panels and retrofitting, or improve local transport links, was trying to create sustainable ways of living greener lives.
Dingle town itself has a population of only about 1,600 people, with 13,000 in the wider vicinity. But it receives a million visitors annually: some to attend festivals, some to tour the spectacular landscape, some to walk or climb and some to simply hang out in Dingle.
Maharees sand dunes: at work are Patricia Herrero, Zoe Rush, Deirdre de Bhailís, general manager of Dingle Hub, Jeanne Spillane, and Martha Farrell. Photograph: Domnick Walsh/Eye Focus 
Ventry Post Office is a great outlet for sustainable and local products in this part of west Kerry. Photograph: Domnick Walsh/Eye Focus
One of their many festivals is the annual food festival each October. In the past, the people who came along to sample the offerings at the various stalls and restaurants used the disposable plates and cutlery they were given. “Last year we did things differently,” says Kelliher.
She has brought a metal tiffin-tin type box with her to show me. Before the festival, Martin Bealin went around the restaurants with this box, and explained that they were trying to reduce waste by not using disposal plates. “People could rent the box for €7 at the beginning of the festival, and bring it back and get €5. Or they could bring their own plates and cutlery,” says Kelliher. There were stations across the festival site to wash the boxes.
It took some persuasion and buy-in from those who would be serving customers, but the tiffin box trial was a huge success with visitors. There was also a lot of activity on Instagram with people posting pictures of their own vintage or unusual plates that they had brought along.
Since then, the Dingle community have loaned out these tiffin boxes to other locations serving food at festivals, and also loaned them to local schools. “It’s all about collaboration and sharing,” says Deirdre de Bhailís, manager of the Dingle Hub.
Earlier this year, farmer Dinny Galvin participated in Meitheal na gCrann on his land: an imitative to promote the planting of 14,000 native trees across the peninsula. It would have taken Galvin three weeks to plant the number of trees he wanted for his land. With the help of some 20 volunteers, the oak, ash, mountain ash and other trees were in the ground within three hours.
A pilot scheme is planned for shared EV chargers at different locations on the peninsula. “You will book a time to charge your car, and pay for it on the app,” says Bealin.
The Maharees sand dunes are in spectacular shape and it’s the result of nine years of consistent action to protect them. Photograph: Domnick Walsh/Eye Focus 
Deirdre de Bhailis of Dingle Hub getting the local link electric bus to Ventry. Photograph: Domnick Walsh/Eye Focus
One striking feature of entries was the number of community WhatsApp groups. Louisburgh in Co Mayo has a WhatsApp group of 700 people who post about items they wish to pass on, or items they need: furniture, clothes, garden things, electrical items (which most charity shops do not accept), and the bits and pieces in every household that are one person’s treasure and another person’s junk.
On the Dingle peninsula, there is a WhatsApp group of 355 people for sharing lifts. “We started it in 2017,” says de Bhailís. “It was a bit of an alien concept back then. There were also a lot of people looking for lifts, and not many offering at the beginning.” By 2022, after the pandemic, the concept “really took off”. People share lifts regularly to Cork, Tralee, Limerick and farther afield.
Unlike the old way of standing by the roadside and hitching lifts with strangers, most of the people on the app are known to each other, so it is safer. Besides, with all the communication being carried out on WhatsApp, everyone knows who is getting a lift with whom. “And it’s a way of getting to know people better too. You might know them a bit, but you’ll know them better after you’ve gone from Dingle to Cork in a car together,” says de Bhailís. “There’s social strength in it too. What’s good for the environment is good socially too.”
Other Dingle Peninsula WhatsApp groups share and trade trees and seeds, vegetables, and seek and give advice on gardening. “We do worry, though, that people might get fed up of too many notifications, if the groups get too big. At what point does a WhatsApp get too unwieldy?” says de Bhailí.
There’s always the mute option, but for now, the WhatsApp method of reaching targeted groups of people across communities in Ireland for sustainability purposes is clearly working well.
Ireland’s Greenest Town Skerries, Co Dublin
Members of the Skerries Eco Team in the community garden at Skerries Wind Mills. Photograph: Alan Betson
Skerries won Ireland’s Greenest Town category. Those who nominated the town said they had been inspired by visits to the eco village at Cloughjordan: itself the original model of sustainable living in Ireland. Among their many green initiatives, the people of Skerries have created a pollinator corridor that runs from Skerries Mills to Ardgillan. It organises groups of local children to gather and remove plastic from the beaches. Here, as in other communities such as Inagh in Co Clare, community buildings including town halls and GAA centres have put in solar panels, replaced pitch lighting with LED, and installed water refill stations.
Skerries is a seaside town, and has come up with the simple but brilliant idea of creating a Beach Toybox. It’s a big box full of the plastic toys children love to play with at the beach – buckets, spades and more. Instead of buying more and more plastic beach toys every summer, and adding to landfill, children can use and reuse for free the items in the Skerries Beach Toybox. Each one is marked with a Sharpie, and you return them to the box when you’re finished.
It’s a green enterprise that could, and surely should, be in place on every Blue Flag beach in the country: our most well-known and most visited beaches.
Ireland’s Greenest CommunityDysart River Project
James Carton and David Fay of the Dysart River Project at Lough Ennell in Co Westmeath. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien
The category winner for Ireland’s Greenest Community was the Dysart River Project in the midlands, nominated by Edel Ennis. In her pitch, Ennis wrote: “Dysart River Project was a participatory, collaborative initiative to improve river water quality in Ireland. Water quality was an issue in Lough Ennell, Co Westmeath for a number of years. Poor water quality can have an effect on an entire community, and it takes community action to fix it.”
Judge Eamon Ryan, who visited the project, said, “in 2019, the designated inland bathing location at Lilliput in Lough Ennell was failing to meet its water quality standards due to ongoing pollution issues, one of which related to runoff from farming activities on the river Dysart, which is part of the Brosna catchment running in and out of the lake.”
Collaboration with the local farming community was essential to the success of the project. It was also helped by the engagement of David O’Malley of the Lough Ennell trout preservation association, who was a key influence. A number of local representatives got together to make a plan.
Ryan said: “It included pilot projects such as the funding of solar pumps and tanks to bring drinking water for cattle away from the lake, expanding the distance that cattle could graze close to the shore, improving slurry spreading techniques and managing the flash flood drainage system, so there was less run-off of nutrient-rich material into the lake. The project was a successful pilot which helped make the case for the establishment of a European Innovation Partnership on water agriculture, which was launched last year.”
Also last year, Lough Ennell was classified as achieving Good Water Quality, based on the assessment of bacteriological results for the period 2021-2024.
Ireland’s Greenest VillageInagh, Co Clare
Jacob McEntee, Helen Meere, Thomas Mackey, Seán Gannon, Shane Lenihan, Green Club Officer and Roisin Ni Gháirbhith at the Inagh Nuttery where they have been planting native Irish hazel trees. Photograph: Eamon Ward
For a tiny village of 192 people, Inagh in Co Clare has achieved an extraordinary amount of support from its residents to be a greener place. Inagh is the winner of Ireland’s Greenest Village. Among the projects completed in Inagh in recent years were planting 30 nut trees, with the intention of making a nut butter business from them, the creation of a sensory garden, making a riverside walk accessible to wheelchairs and buggies, and lobbying for a pedestrian crossing on a road that connects most of the village’s housing to the school, church and village hall.
The church grounds were left unmowed, and the area is now covered in spotted orchids, marsh orchids, the rare adder’s tongue plant, meadow thistle and several others. There are bat boxes on trees and under the bridge arches.
A village playground was made by volunteer parents, reusing soil from landfill, with sapling native trees providing screening between it and the nearby housing estate. Residents were consulted about having trees as a screen instead of a fence, and were happy to choose trees, even though they will be slower over time to provide privacy.
There is also an orchard of newly planted eating apple trees in the playground, which the children eat, and next year, there is a plan for raspberry canes. Such a clever enterprise of making a playground also a place to access free healthy snacks for children is one that has the potential to be replicated in many other playgrounds. So too is Inagh’s inspirational plastic-free Christmas market, which now attracts visitors from all over the county. An improved bus service, extending into the evening, is helping to transform rural life.
Ireland’s Greenest Suburb Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire ‘will become a blueprint for other locations across Ireland’
Dún Laoghaire was the winner of Ireland’s Greenest Suburb. One of the nominees, Robert McCullagh, wrote in his pitch about how Dún Laoghaire was “reimagining urban spaces to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists and access to the marina, reduce car dominance, and enhance biodiversity with more trees, seating, and shared public spaces.”
McCullagh pointed out that the local council “supports the circular economy through repair cafes, reuse centres, and zero-waste initiatives that reduce landfill and promote sustainable consumption. The new bus routes are integrated to the Dart and Luas with well-developed cycling routes.”
In making his report, judge Kevin O’Sullivan said that what had happened in Dún Laoghaire in recent years was the “transformation of a large urban space that has been signed off by Dún Laoghaire County Council; community organisations, business organisations and people living in the suburb. What began through a committed WhatsApp group of 120 people has become a model for community development, with its connections now extending to every fabric of Dún Laoghaire’s development including Tidy Towns.”
This transformation all took time, and involved prolonged consultation with the local community: “a dialogue that went on for years, that helped build trust and the process at all times was reinforced by proper research. Flexibility in allowing essential traffic movement is ensured through modal filters allowing, for example, emergency services to operate effectively and for easy cycling rather than closing roads.”
What was achieved in Dún Laoghaire was done by changing public perception of what O’Sullivan described as “proximity. Allowing places to become living places – facilitating cycling or walking to school, leisure walking that is safer, cutting out rat runs, getting rid of clutter, improving linkages to adjoining areas and maximising public transport – while listening to nature.”
The project has another two years to run before it is fully completed. O’Sullivan predicts that “there is every indication Dún Laoghaire will become a blueprint for other locations across Ireland.”
No doubt all the winning Greenest Places will find themselves being visited in the near future by other communities around the county hoping to learn from what they have achieved. We know all too well now that our world is a fragile place we all need to take care of.
Honourable mention: Ambrosetown Cemetery, Co Wexford
Donal Keane, Seán Sinnott and Mathew Stafford, volunteers at Ambrosetown Graveyard, in Rathangan, Co Wexford. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
The most unusual entry we received in the competition was from Donal Keane, who nominated Ambrosetown Cemetery in Duncormick in Co Wexford. This shortlisted entry made each of the judges think differently about a space we had all taken for granted. Every community in the country has at least one graveyard: the most meaningful of spaces to anyone who has a family member or friend interred there. But most of these graveyards, particularly in rural setting, were originally fields.
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Keane’s entry detailed how the caretakers were using strimmers to keep the grass tidy, and making sure to not use any pesticides. The trees were yew and Irish white beam, and they are looking at removing evening primrose, which is not native, and replacing it with native wildflowers. It’s an important example of how graveyards in Ireland could potentially be places of additional biodiversity.