AGM 2026

Dear Residents,


I'm very happy to report that we had an excellent turnout of aprox 130 people at the AGM at the Sandymount Hotel on Monday 13th last week!


Here's the agenda we followed.

In attendance we had our Dublin Bay South Public representatives, TDs Minister Jim O'Callaghan and TDs Ivana Bacik, James Geoghegan and Eoin Hayes.  A separate meeting is planned in the near term with Pembroke Councillors who could not attend due to an unavoidable clash with a Dublin City Council meeting.


On mainline AGM business, we overviewed the Treasurer report and declared our finances to be in good health. 


We elected a new committee for 2026/27 (most continuing) and thanked the 3 retiring members (Paddy Smyth, Nick Seymour and Jeremy Humphries) for their contributions.


There is, however, still space on the committee if anyone is feeling motivated to want to step forward: 

  • we have meetings monthly (barring a Christmas and a Summer break month) and they very rarely last more than 90 minutes.
  • we are in particular in need of skills in environmental science with knowledge of how to engage with the EPA. We believe that to be key in making progress on the Uisce Eireann St Albans sewage to beach saga.


On memberships, we are determined to make joining SAMRA a simpler and easier process and believe we have now cracked this on the new website page Membership  The steps are described there, requiring your payment card only, for your selected annual plan. There is an email yet to be sent specifically to all members who continue to pay via Paypal, to tell them when their annual membership renewal is due - and to do so via the new process. The old Paypal process will close by 1st June.


We ask that you extend an invitation to your neighbours and relatives and friends who live in the area to join SAMRA Membership


For SAMRA to leverage our public representatives on the issues which are important to us, our currency of success is simply the number of memberships. We are therefore keen to increase this, which will also enable us to keep the cost of subscriptions to the minimum. 


The Village Ideas Project Community Engagement Plan was the main agenda item of the meeting. This had been the work of the Village Ideas sub-committee over the last 30 months, master-minded and lead by Niall McElroy and which after over-view was presented in detail at the meeting by the principal of Grafton Architects, Yvonne Farrell and her team. 


We are very pleased to have on the subcommittee both the Chair of Sandymount Tidy Towns, Rita Collins and in addition Bronwyn Thomson coordinating across the Sandymount businesses. With engagement and alignment across Sandymount's two representative community organisations and the businesses, we believe that these projects become a more compelling proposition to DCC Executive.


The Community Engagement plan provides for members to give specific feedback on each and every one of the 12 Village Ideas Project elements Feedback


As we go forward we intend that this work will provide a multi-year menu of options for DCC to turn into future projects to enhance our area. SAMRA will continue to engage with DCC on that programme and it will be crucial to have demonstrable public opinion to guide forward steps. We believe that this platform now enables SAMRA to be able to do that and the last part of the website is dedicated to enable individual responses back to SAMRA. 


We are seeking your feedback now Feedback


We concluded the meeting at 9:30pm after an energetic Q and A session followed by networking for another hour with a glass of wine.


Garda John Healy from Irish Town Community Guards gave the meeting a good update on some crime trends in the locality and gave a clear set of guidance on how to avoid falling prey. This detail guidance can be found in the notes attached.


Finally, thank you to John Loughran and his team Sandymount Hotel for hosting us all again. They always make us feel very comfortable.