Estate Maintenance

Our gardeners, Garden ER, continue to work away on our maintenance programme and we hope you agree that they are doing an excellent job. We have carried out some minor planting around the Estate but have held off doing any major work until our financial position is a little clearer. If funds allow, we plan to do a fairly significant clean-up, in October/November, and to cut back the shrubbery and hedges generally. We will update you on this in coming weeks.

Unfortunately we continue to have damage to a number of the trees in the Estate and again urge residents to let a member of the committee know if you see anything of this nature. Our intention is to replace some of these trees, and also trees that have succumbed to disease, in the coming months.

In our last letter we advised that we were going to utilise funds received from Wicklow County Council to re-paint the walls at the front of the Estate. Due to the low numbers willing to help to do this work we deferred the painting and decided to apply a fungicide to the walls instead. This latter work was recently completed by two members of the Committee. We are hoping that the application of the fungicide will result in cleaner walls and the removal of the red staining currently evident. In addition, if this works, it will mean less maintenance going forward. 

Funding

Contributions for the current Quarter are now due and we would be grateful to receive these as soon as possible. As a reminder - for people who wish to pay the full contribution the amount due is €180; half-yearly payment is €90; quarterly payment is €45 and monthly payment is €15.  Disappointingly there are still a number of houses that do not contribute anything to the upkeep of the Estate. While accepting that everybody’s circumstances are different we are simply asking people to give what you feel you can afford. In the final analysis everybody benefits from the quality of the Estate environment. Clearly the greater the contribution level we receive the more we can do. An envelope is attached for this Quarter’s payments and these can be dropped into number 33 or 45 or handed to any member of the Committee. We thank those who have already made their payments and look forward to receiving other contributions over coming weeks.

Other Matters

AGM – Traditionally our AGM has taken place towards the end of October/early November. We feel that it is more appropriate now to hold it at the beginning of each fiscal year to allow for completion of our full accounts. With that in mind we are proposing to hold the AGM in January, with the exact date to be communicated before the end of the year. Our Constitution requires us to hold an AGM at least annually and we are satisfied that this change i.e. moving the AGM to January rather November does not offend the Constitution. However, if anyone has a major objection to this please provide us with a written note explaining your concerns and we will attempt to address this.

Communications/Web Site

To further enhance communications with residents we have recently set-up a Web site, for Aughrim Hall, and this can be accessed through the following url – https://ahra.ie . One of our residents, Stuart McLean, very kindly did all of the work on this and we hope to continue to develop the site over coming weeks and months. If you have any thoughts or ideas on how we might better use this resource please let us know. Our thanks to Stuart for all of his assistance. As a reminder you can contact us via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Finally we extend our congratulations and best wishes to one of our residents who had a recent family addition.

Regards, for and on behalf of the Committee

Seamus Cramer

Chairperson