Southill Area centre Community Garden is available for members of the community to use. Our gardener, Barbara, is available to share her knowledge and answer any questions you have about your own garden or about planting. Gardening classes will run throughout the year and workshops on seed saving and planting will take place also.

Call to the centre at any time to find out more.

The project was launched in 2009. Please click here to see photographs of then and now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Healthy Food for All is an all-island multi-agency initiative which seeks to combat food poverty by promoting access, availability and affordability of healthy food for low-income groups.

Healthy Food for All act as an information and networking resource for anyone interested in food poverty and its relationship with food and nutrition policy, health inequalities, welfare adequacy, educational disadvantage, food production and distribution, retail planning and food safety.

Key areas of work are:

• Community & School Food Initiatives
• Policy
• Networking

Approximately 15% of the population experience some type of food deprivation according to EU-SILC figures.  Research into the affordability of healthy eating for low-income groups undertaken by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland found that families dependent on social welfare would have to spend one third of their weekly budget on food in order to obtain a healthy diet.  Even though low-income families spend a higher proportion of their income (23-25%) on food compared to other socio-economic groups (17%) they tend to have poorer nutritional intake.  The research found that it is up to ten times cheaper to provide calories in the form of unhealthy foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar than it is in the form of protective foods such as fruit and vegetables and other important foods such as lean meat and fish (FSAI, 2009)

safefood is a North-South body, responsible for the promotion of food safety on the island of Ireland. It was established in 1999 under the terms of the British-Irish Agreement Act 1999 and the North-South Co-operation (Implementation Bodies) Northern Ireland Order 1999.

The governing legislation confers the following specific functions on the organisation:

• Promotion of food safety
• Research into food safety
• Communication of food alerts
• Surveillance of foodborne disease
• Promotion of scientific co-operation and laboratory linkages
• Development of cost-effective facilities for specialised laboratory testing

In addition to these specific functions, safefood has a general remit to act as an independent source of scientific advice.