CIRCUIT ORGANISATIONS that had suspended their activities during the holiday months of July and August are beginning to make everything ready for the recommencement of their regular programmes in September. Some of them will be calling on the Department of Youth and Children’s Work to send a Tom to encourage them and refresh their ideas. A Tom is a “team on mission”, and this is the 21st year in which such teams have been recruited.
For the first three weeks in September this year’s recruits will go into intensive preparation for their work. There are seven of them – four girls and three boys – all aged 18 or 19. They come from Whitehead, Newtownabbey, Donegal, Belfast and Doagh.
Child protection remains a priority with the department and it is organising initiation and refresher courses in this respect on August 27th at Carrick-on-Shannon, September 3rd at Sydenham, Belfast and September 8th at Coleraine.
The Annual Assembly of Methodist Women in Ireland (MWI) will take place in Darling Street Methodist Church, Enniskillen on Saturday, September 5th. The incoming president will be Mrs Joy Graham. She is a member of the church in Maguiresbridge, and has recently been deeply involved in raising funds of the new hospice in Fermanagh. She has taken as her presidential theme “Embrace his power, share his love”.
On Friday, September 4th, an international gathering in Limerick city and county will celebrate the tercentenary of the arrival in the area of a large number of refugees from Germany, whose descendants can still be identified as the Irish Palatines. It was from the Rhenish Palatinate that the refugees came. On Saturday a full day symposium at the University of Limerick will discuss aspects of their life in Germany, Ireland and Canada.
On Sunday, September 6th, at the newly cleared site of the Methodist chapel at Killeheen, in which some of them worshipped for several generations, a memorial will be unveiled. Later in the day the Rev Dudley Levistone Cooney will speak about Switzer’s of Grafton Street, probably the only business of international repute to be founded by an Irish Palatine.
The morning service to be televised by RTÉ 1 on Sunday, August 30th, will come from the studio in Donnybrook. It will be led by the Rev Dr John Stephens, Dublin District Superintendent, Philip McKinley and members of the Methodist congregation of Blanchardstown, who will be joined in the studio by some members of the Abbey Street congregation.
Blanchardstown is the most recently formed of the congregations in the Dublin area, having begun to meet in November last. Mr McKinley is their development officer.