A short speech for the Grande Finale

Botanical Odyssey is a collaborative drawing remembering and imagining plantlife in the Glen. It was created by the participants in a workshop with artist, Julie Forrester and took place at the outset of Gleann a Phúca on 22 September – the day the Púca is said to ride into winter, spitting on the Blackberries and turning the fruit.

Since then we have had a year of odyssey and excursions into the park with projects Ordinary Gifts and Spoon & Bloom. We have been spellbound by a host of storytellers about ecology: naturalist Éanna Ní Lamhna; botanist Jo Goodyear; folklorist Jenny Butler; herbalist Eoin Marshall. Each in turn has led us through the hidden valley of the Glen. Birdwatch Ireland Cork introduced us to the particular concert of Birdsong in the valley, The Friends of the Dripsey River brought us monsters magnified from the shallows: those tiny creatures that we examined with Water Officer, Catherine Seale and Scientist Trisha O’Brien are invertebrates that tell us and warn us about our water quality. Historian Gerard O’Brien brought us back to a time, growing up in the Glen, when the Gouldings Fertiliser and industry that supported livelihoods and left residues and about corncrakes and thorneens, now sadly missing from our waters. Elinor Rivers tuned us into the water showing we can all feel the pulse with hazel twitch or metal rod. In our culminating event Annie Mar and Aaron Ross have brought the stories together in their animation “Glen Folk” and Dervla Baker and Neil Quigley have created their short film River in homage to the Glen River. Ann Dalton brings forth the voices of women from the Glen and Helga Deasy performs with the river in a dance that celebrates the river as a source of life, healing and regeneration.

We have gained much from our river and it is time now to take more care of the waters that have brought us life and living, the Glen needs our help to ensure its future health, we urgently need to pay attention to what we put into our water from washing, flushing, cleaning: the water carries it all. The river is suffering and can no longer support the bio-diversity it once harboured. The river needs to run a course with healthy banks, we find that we have sealed the surface of its edges with cement and asphalt, encroaching on the river’s safe passage and causing floods when the rains come as they do more heavily now with climate change. We can build rain gardens to work with the flow of water, becoming part of the flow, becoming river – our rain gardens will absorb excess water from our homes and support biodiversity. We can stop using harmful chemicals in our cleaning fluids we can think before we wash and flush – where does it all go? We can pay attention to our drains become more curious about how they work and who cares for them we can own our place in the Water cycle. Our actions make a difference for better of for worse. Let’s make it better.