Migrants and locals come together to improve community in Fermoy

It’s a very warm Saturday afternoon in Fermoy’s Corrin View Estate, a settled, older part of town, and five volunteers from Fermoy Tidy Towns are hard at work tidying up a communal flowerbed.

“We’re trying separate the winter weeds from the wild flowers, and it’s just a matter of clearing it out,” says Paul Kavanagh, project manager with Fermoy Tidy Towns.

“Many hands make light work. We’ll get this done in a couple of hours and the residents will pick out a couple of new flowers that they will plant themselves and watch them grow.” 

He is ed by Fernando Ferreira, a long-time Tidy Towns stalwart, and David, Samuel and David, three residents of the St Joseph’s accommodation centre. Paul says that there was a much larger group of International Protection applicants out earlier, planting flowerpots and boxes along the Cork Road, but, he adds mischievously, they’ve gone home for a siesta.

David One, as he is soon christened, is from Nigeria, and he has been in Fermoy since January. He says he loves being part of Tidy Towns.

“I see this country as very cool, and people who live in Fermoy are very kind, I’m so happy,” he says. “At times people come up and say ‘Thank you’, and that is very kind of them.” 

Joan Crowley of the Corrin View Residents’ Association says she and her neighbours are very grateful to the volunteers.

“We really appreciate all that these young people do to help us, which is work we just wouldn’t be able to do, and we really appreciate the work that Paul does to organise it all,” she says.

Samuel, like David, is from Nigeria, and came here in November. Like David, he says he has been made to feel welcome in Fermoy by the people he meets when he’s out volunteering.

“They are wonderful people, there are very kind and wonderful, and they encourage us with their welcome,” he says.

The other David is from Angola, and he came to Ireland with his wife and their four children. Fernando, a native of Porto, translates our conversation back and forth between Portuguese and English.

“The Irish people are such nice people, the people in Fermoy say to me that I am welcome in this town,” he says.

Fernando says the new arrivals have been a great help to the Tidy Towns and they have rejuvenated the project.

“People like Samuel, every day he is asking me if I have any work for him, they are such great workers,” he says. 

“They’re good people, and they are very grateful to be made to feel like they’re part of the community.” 

As we talk, Samuel and the two Davids are tearing into their work, clearing back vegetation at a phenomenal rate.

Last summer, the Tidy Towns cleaned up the old promenade on the southern bank of the Blackwater, and they were ed in their work by Ukrainian refugees staying in the former Grand Hotel. This year, they are ed by volunteers from even further afield.

John Lenihan, a Corrin View resident, says the new arrivals are a breath of fresh air for the town.

“It’s very good to see [them] getting stuck in, that’s very good for our community, and for them to come into our community and to help complete strangers in the Tidy Towns, it’s just excellent to see,” he says.

Paul Kavanagh says he sometimes hears people praise the new arrivals for their volunteering, but some assume they are on social welfare.

“People see them out doing work like this and they say ‘Fair play to them, they’re earning their dole’, and that’s completely wrong,” Paul Kavanagh says.

“Anyone in St Joseph’s is seeking International Protection, which means they get their bed and board, and forty quid a week to live on. They’re fed and found, three meals a day, and I’m told the accommodation is good in St Joseph’s, but adults are given €38.80 a week beyond that, and kids get €29.80.

“They’re not ‘earning their dole’ – basic unemployment assistance is €220 a week - these people are volunteering because they want to get to know people and integrate into the community, and they want to give something back, because they have a bit of pride in the place they’re living in, not because they’re getting forty quid a week,” he said.