The B Team

Brilliant Ballybunion is coordinated by Grainne Toomey from Ballybunion Community Forum in partnership with The Barna Way, Lisa Fingleton (Artist), Rena Blake (Photographer/Grower), Dr Joanne O Brien (Ecologist) and Dr Clare Watson (Reflective Learning Evaluator).

Ballybunion Community Forum

Ballybunion Community Forum is an elected umbrella body for all groups in the town and an incorporated limited company. The forum have a specific remit in relation to the promotion of Ballybunion community and tourism. They are responsible for managing numerous large scale community events, the tourist office, the MOYA festival as well as supporting many grant applications, marketing plans and studies.

The Barna Way

The Barna Way is a nineteen acre organic farm and native woodland on the west coast of Ireland in Ballybunion. The Barna Way engages with the diverse community groups through social farming and live food and cultural events, while protecting habitats for wildlife. This seventeen year project is propelled by an accelerated sense of urgency around food insecurity, climate crisis, biodiversity loss and forced migration.

The Community Collaborators

The Community Collaborators are 14 people from or living in Ballybunion who have agreed to take a 2 year creative journey with the B Team to learn about local biodiversity and grow their own food. A fantastic group with such a range of lived experiences, skills and passion for Ballybunion, this amazing place we call home. It is really heartwarming to hear everyone’s hopes and motivations for joining us on the Brilliant Ballybunion journey.

Our Team

Gráinne Toomey

Gráinne is a passionate community person from Ballybunion who set up and managed a community childcare centre for 18 years catering for over 100 families.  Changing her career direction, she made a hobby a profession, when she became a professional photographer and  opened my new business in July 2023. It is a gift and coffee shop in Ballybunion called Beach Hive, with her business partner.

As a photographer, she is passionate about both creative expression and the beauty of the natural world. Gráinne is secretary of Ballybunion Community Forum. She is an advocate for wellbeing and mindfulness. In 2017 Gráinne co-founded the very successful MOYA festival (up to 5000 visitors) which takes place in Ballybunion on the May Bank Holiday every year. MOYA stands for Meditation, Ocean, Yoga & Art.  It is a festival of wellness and nature. It has helped to establish Ballybunion as a place of solace, fun, kindness and freedom of expression on the Wild Atlantic Way.

Lisa Fingleton

Lisa Fingleton is an artist, filmmaker, writer and grower who has spent over twenty years cultivating deep-rooted connections between art, food and farming. Her projects incorporate socially engaged, collaborative and performative process; participatory moving image; large scale drawing installations; as well as creative and autobiographical writing.

Grounded on a nineteen acre organic farm and native woodland on the west coast of Ireland, she and her partner run a project called The Barna Way. Lisa was the embedded artist with A Creative Imagining, one of 15 pilot projects funded by the Creative Climate Action Fund with the Dingle Hub, Green Arts Initiative and the Marei Centre. Together they supported farmers on the Dingle Penninsula to creatively look at ways in which they can respond to climate change.

In 2022 Lisa worked with Creative Ireland and the OPW at the National Ploughing Championship to produce a 100 foot Interactive drawing called A Creative Climate Wall. This drawing responded live to the solutions for climate change offered by farmers. The drawing was installed at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) for the Earth Rising Festival.

Rena Blake

Rena is a photographer and organic grower. Rena and her partner Lisa run The Barna Way, an organic eco-social farm in Ballybunion. She is a facilitator with Kerry Social Farmer and supports social farming on farms around Kerry with adults with intellectual and physical disabilities. Rena is also a host farmer for the last 5 years with up to four participants each week who come to The Barna Way to grow food, help with biodiversity and drink lots of tea!

She also helped establish the very successful Kerry Eco-Social Farming Biodiversity EIP-Agri project which supported 26 social farms to carry out practical biodiversity and climate actions on their farms during 2022 (biodiversity ponds, native hedgerows, bird boxes, native woodlands etc)

Dr Clare Watson

Clare was brought up on a small organic farm outside Cork city. She has a social work background and over the years has worked on many community-based social and environmental projects across Ireland. While experimenting with sustainable living in West Cork, Clare published an online blog (2013), looking at the influence of human psychology and behaviour on our reaction to climate change. This led to PhD research in MaREI/UCC on how to engage communities in climate action.

Between 2018 and April 2023, Clare led the MaREI engaged research team in Dingle Peninsula 2030, supporting the sustainable transition on the peninsula. She established a process of reflective learning within the partnership and co-created a series of learning briefs (including three for the 2022 Dingle Peninsula Creative Imagining project). Clare now works on a freelance basis and is leading a process of reflective learning and evaluation within Brilliant Ballybunion – tracking the benefits, challenges, experiences, learnings and achievements of those involved.

Dr Joanne O Brien

Joanne is a lecturer and researcher at the Atlantic Technological university (ATU) on the Applied Freshwater and Marine Biology degree, as well as the Conservation Behaviour and IMBRSea MSc programmes. Since 2004, she has carried out numerous offshore and inshore marine mammal visual and acoustic surveys onboard the state research vessels. She was work-package leader on the PReCAST project, responsible for Static and Passive acoustic monitoring. She was PI on an EPA funded project assessing Ocean Noise in Irish waters 2011-2013, ObSERVE Acoustic project (2015-2018), SeaMonitor (2019-2023), and is currently PI on Corncrake LIFE (2021-2025) and STRAITS (2023-2027). Her research interests are marine mammals, bioacoustics, effects of anthropogenic noise, soundscapes and habitat modelling but is also actively involved in acoustic research across a range of freshwater and terrestrial species.