Wexford Tidy Towns were delighted to welcome Members of the Canadian Missions Team back to Wexford this Summer. They along with Wexford Christian Community Church Youth Group and Wexford Tidy Towns headed to Redmond Park on 25th July to paint, weed, litter pick and plant some flowers. The next day the Canadian Christian group joined us out on the Redmond Road to clean and transform this area. They were a lovely bunch of people and great workers. Thank you all so much for your contribution, thanks to Pastor Daniel for bringing them to us and thank you Paul, Cathy and Carolyn for all your hard work. We hope to have you all back next year.

Our Summer evening clean-ups continued in the town, Westgate was regularly tidied and cleaned, the Bullring was litter picked mostly of cigarette butts and the flower tubs were weeded and watered. We also held a number of Action Days during the Summer months. The old Presbyterian Church in Row Street got a facelift thanks to our volunteers on 6th August due to their painting, weeding and planting. Great work was done by, Ger Murphy, Joe Doyle and Joe Ryan, before our Action Day to prepare the area for painting.

We met August, 27th and September 10th in the car park behind Kennedy Park. Well done to everyone who took part to improve this area. We were very happy with the results. There was litter removed from Saint Aidans, Kennedy Park and Whiterock Hill. On September 17th we held our Action Day along the Quays removing lots of rubbish from the rock area there, over 21 bags were collected.

Thank to our volunteers for their continued support and help they are making a huge difference in our town, keeping Wexford clean and beautiful. We have the Tidy Town Awards coming up soon in the Helix on September 26th. We look forward to hopefully seeing all our hard work be recognised on this important day for us.

Wexford Tidy Towns undertook several areas to improve during the Summer months with our largest project being St. Peter’s Square which was given a much needed facelift to this beautiful spot in our town. The major upgrade included painting flower tubs, the bandstand and fountain, cleaning the area and replanting the flowerbeds. Our volunteers are a real asset to our town and have shown the great work they can do to make this significant improvement to St. Peter’s Square. A lot of love and attention went into this project so go have a look at this area in our town, a beautiful place to stop and sit or pass through.

We also focused on several other areas, flower beds were weeded and got ready for the new plants, Wexford in Bloom did their annual flowering of the town, the anti-gum litter campaign was running, there was painting, weeding and sweeping around Clifford Street/Bride street which made a significant improvement to this area. We also focused on the main streets of our town, carparks, the Bullring and Crescent – All Working together to keep Wexford Clean and Beautiful.

We would like to thank Stuart in Aldi for the donation of some lovely unsold flowers, burst bags of compost and bark that he has donated to Wexford Tidy Towns. We would also like to thank John in Tesco who has donated unsold plants to use in our projects. We are so grateful and will put all the lovely plants and compost to great use. Thank you to you both for your donation this Summer now we can bloom up the town even more.

Thanks to all our volunteers for everything they have achieved this year. We are always looking for more volunteers everyone is welcome and there is something to do for everyone. We really need your help so why don’t you come on down for a couple of hours to help out. If you have a community project in mind or would like to do a litter pick walk yourself get in touch and we can supply litter pickers. Keep an eye on our Facebook or website for details of upcoming events. We meet on Saturdays and some evening during the week if you can help in any way get in touch.

Wexford Tidy Towns have been hard at work this Spring holding some very successful Action Days, organising clean-ups, launching several new initiatives and working with the community to keep Wexford clean and beautiful. Here are some of our highlights so far this year:

We got off to a great start on the first action day on 16th January. Some of us headed to the rocks to help out the Mary’s G.A.A who were holding a clean-up there. The rest of us got lots of flower bulbs sown around the town thanks to Woodies who donated hundreds of flower bulbs to help flower up the town this year.

We launched a couple of initiatives including looking at placing new cigarette bins around the main street and repairing the broken ones. Also we saw the successful launch of the Mutt Mitts initiative with the installation of new bins plus mutt mitts dispensers (doggy poo bags) placed on some of the main dog walking routes in the town. We hope to expand this scheme to other areas in the future. Please use the bags and bins to make this initiative work and see an increase of bin/dispenser locations.

Another Action Day that was held was at the Knock in Bishopswater on Saturday March 12th. Thank you to everyone who came as we got some amazing work done. Some of our finds included 2 trolleys, a bike, half a pram and 32 bags of rubbish as you can see from the photos! Our volunteers removed a huge amount of rubbish and really improved the area.

As April came we saw the launch of 2016 An Taisce National Spring Clean. We held several clean-ups this month as well as encouraged people in the community to get involved in keeping their own areas clean. We met up near Woodies and collected 12 bags of rubbish a lot of it was fast food related so please bin your rubbish when you are done eating! Lots of weeding, planting and cleaning got done in St. Peter’s Square Saturday April 23rd with further painting planned for the area at one of our evening meetups during the week. We would like to thank Stuart at Aldi for donating lots of plants to Wexford Tidy Towns/Wexford in Bloom.

Wexford Tidy Towns have lots more events planned in the coming months keep an eye out for Wexford in Bloom who are hard at work getting ready for another Summer as they work with businesses and residents to flower up the town. We are always looking for new volunteers for our Action Days/Clean-ups or to work with groups who would like to keep their own community areas or estates clean just get in touch or turn up at one of our events.