The GIVE US BACK OUR HARBOUR Committee Meeting Room | The Beach House | The Harbour | Greystones | Co Wicklow Email: gubohn@gmail.com Web: facebook.com/groups/greystones
Mission statement The GIVE US BACK OUR HARBOUR group was set up in April 2011 after work at the Greystones Harbour construction site came to a full stop, with no indication that public access to the harbour amenity would be restored 3.5 years after it was taken away. The sole objective of the group is to have the new harbour immediately restored to public use as an amenity for the community of Greystones, and as part of that to have the hoardings surrounding much of the site removed. In the plans for the harbour, both as originally approved by An Bórd Pleanála and in the latest version, a significant area of the harbour near the existing retail premises is intended to become a public plaza with a small in-‐harbour beach, entirely open to the public. The harbour walls or piers are also intended to be accessible by the public at large. Construction work on the harbour itself is now complete. Given the economic downturn and the collapse of the property market, no further construction work on any further phase of the plan is likely to start for some time. As the community has been deprived of the harbour amenity for three and a half years, and the removal of the hoardings is now about 18 months behind schedule, the GIVE US BACK OUR HARBOUR group has one simple demand: remove the hoardings and give us back access to our harbour, which has always been the core marine amenity in the town and an important part of community life. The group will organise petitions, lobbies, demonstrations and protests in order to achieve our aim of having the hoardings around the site taken down and the harbour amenity returned to the people so that they can enjoy it during the summer of 2011. We do not intend that the people of Greystones and visitors to our town to be deprived of this amenity for a fourth successive summer. We believe this is a simple issue with a simple solution. We expect our public representatives, council officials, and the developers to show a positive, can-do attitude and act immediately to restore to the public the harbour amenity which we and our visitors previously enjoyed for decades.