A community garden that is widely used in Galway city has been vandalised twice in a month.
The Merlin Woods community garden was targeted once in the second week in December and again on December 28th.
Local TD Mairéad Farrell said it was “really disturbing to see this level of targeted vandalism. I’m incredibly angry and annoyed about what has happened here”.
Caroline Stanley of Friends of Merlin Woods described the vandalism as “extremely disheartening”.
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“The garden has become a very important social space as well as gardening space,” she said.
She said the attacks could not be dismissed as “mindless vandalism” because the vandals removed everything they had broken and deposited it at another site some 10 minutes’ walk away in Merlin Woods.
Vandals smashed the mini-greenhouse, the orchard and butterfly garden. They used considerable force to remove butterfly antenna that were embedded into the ground.
They came out the second time and removed all the fruit trees and sawed the remaining poles. Wooden edges for the fruit beds were removed and dumped.
The motivation for the attacks are unknown but whoever did it left one half of a broken religious statue amid the pile of rubble after the first attack and the other half after the second attack.
The damaged material from the garden was put in a pile with pages of torn up books, religious objects such as rosary beads and jewellery.
Ms Stanley said whoever did it was trying to send the community garden organisers a message, but she did not know what it was.
“We don’t have any enemies that I know of. We work with local schools, women’s group, scouts and Foróige. The garden was started from scratch and it is open to everybody,” she said.
“Sometimes these things turn out to be crazier than you first thought. We have no idea, but we have never been known to be defeated. We will be reopening next week.”
Ms Stanley said they had considered putting a gate and railings around the garden, but thought that defeated the purpose of it in the first place.
“People are raging. This is an open garden. We have kept it open purposely when we are not there. The schools use it as an outdoor classroom. It is a really well-used space. It was built to be welcoming,” she said.
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