Rotary Club of Raheny is a small, hands-on club of neighbours, professionals and retirees who put their skills to work locally and support Rotary's global projects. We meet in person and on Zoom, so you can join us from a library room in Baldoyle or from your kitchen table.
Raheny was chartered in 2018 as one of the newer clubs in Rotary's Irish district, sponsored by the Rotary Club of Dublin North. We deliberately kept the format light: one business meeting a month, a social outing in between, and everything available online for anyone who cannot make it across the city.
Our members come from business, healthcare, teaching, the trades and retirement. What they share is a habit of noticing what a neighbourhood needs and then doing something about it. Rotary calls this Service Above Self. In practice it looks like a Saturday morning, a boot full of hampers and a list of addresses.
We are one of the clubs of District 1160, the only Rotary district that covers the whole island of Ireland, north and south.
Meetings move fully online during orange and red weather warnings. Email us to request a Zoom invitation for any meeting, including your first.
Every Rotary club balances the same three commitments. Ours are shaped by the parishes and coastline around us.
Hands-on projects in Raheny, Baldoyle, Sutton and Howth: Christmas hampers for families under pressure, support for local charities, and fundraising events that bring the neighbourhood out.
Our subscriptions and fundraising feed into Rotary's global humanitarian work, from clean water and maternal health to the long campaign to end polio, now within sight of the finish.
We back the next generation through Rotaract for 18 to 30 year olds, Interact in schools, and the Youth Leadership Development Competition, which puts Irish teenagers in front of real audiences.
Rotary began in a Chicago office in 1905. Six years later it crossed the Atlantic and landed in Dublin. Our club is a recent chapter in a long Irish story, and the district we belong to has always ignored the border.
Paul Harris gathers three acquaintances to recreate the neighbourliness of the small town he grew up in. They meet in rotation at each other's workplaces, which gives the movement its name.
The Rotary Club of Dublin is chartered, the first anywhere beyond the United States and Canada. Belfast follows within the same year, and London soon after. Rotary's international life effectively starts on this island.
Irish and British clubs form a joint association, which becomes Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland. Irish clubs have been administered alongside their neighbours ever since, while remaining part of Rotary International worldwide.
Clubs are chartered in Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Galway and beyond. Through partition, civil war and a new border, Irish Rotarians keep meeting each other north and south — one of very few civic bodies on the island that never split.
Wartime rationing and travel restrictions shrink club life, but Irish clubs turn to refugee relief, hospital supplies and support for families of servicemen and emigrants.
After Paul Harris's death, memorial gifts build the Rotary Foundation into a global grant-making body. Irish clubs begin sending and hosting scholars, and international service becomes a standing part of every club's year.
Rotary commits to immunising the children of the world against polio. Four decades on it remains the movement's defining campaign, and Irish clubs — Raheny included — still fundraise for it every year.
Rotary International removes the men-only clause from its constitution. Irish clubs open to women, and within a generation women are serving as club presidents and district officers across the island.
All of Ireland's clubs sit in District 1160, the only Rotary district covering the whole island, north and south. Raheny is one of its 66 clubs.
Sponsored by the Rotary Club of Dublin North, the Rotary Club of Raheny is chartered as a hybrid club built for people with full lives — a format that turned out to be well ahead of its time.
The Rotary International Convention is due in Dublin, bringing tens of thousands of Rotarians to the city that gave the movement its first home abroad.
Dates follow Rotary International and Rotary Ireland's own published histories. If you have club records, photographs or minutes from the early Dublin clubs, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
There is no application to fill in before you visit. Turn up at Baldoyle Library on a second Monday, or email us and we will send you a Zoom link. Have a cup of tea, watch how the club works, and decide afterwards.
Membership suits people who want to give a few hours a month to something concrete, and who enjoy the company that comes with it. Age, profession and background are wide open. Willingness is the only requirement.