Kildare man leads Ireland's biggest Christmas Day Dinner

A KILDARE man will be leading Ireland’s biggest Christmas Day dinner this year. Trevor McNamara who lives in Naas is one of a number of volunteers from across Kildare taking part in this year’s Christmas Day Dinner at the RDS. Each year for the past century the Knights of St Columbus and other volunteers have provided a full Christmas day meal on Christmas day for homeless and vulnerable people.

The organisation provides a hot meal and a gift bag with about a week’s worth of food for 500 guests. In addition to giving goody bags and meals to other organisations like Focus Ireland, Alone, the HSE, the gardaí, among others. Volunteers will also deliver gift bags and meals to people in their homes. This year the organisation will provide 5,500 meals.

Trevor is the current chairperson of the Christmas Day Dinner and it will be his 11th year volunteering with the organisation. The previous chairperson, Adrian King, is also from Kildare.

“It’s a wonderful event that I’m very proud of,” said Trevor.

Trevor began participating in the dinner as his children were more grown up which enabled his family to be more flexible about when they sat down to eat their Christmas dinner.

He was asked to start volunteering by the late Barney McPoland, also of Naas, who lived across the road from him and needed people to help deliver the meals to people in their homes.

Trevor said the purpose of the Christmas Day Dinner is to give other agencies which provide meal services year-round a break over the Christmas period. It, of course, also gives those in unfortunate circumstances a respite and some Christmas cheer.

The organisation needs 200 volunteers to run each year, and Trevor said that he couldn’t remember a year when they weren’t fully subscribed within a day of opening for sign-ups.

“If we wanted 1000 volunteers very year, we could get them, people are so generous.” 

The day itself is run professionally as the team only have one day to get everything right logistically.

The cost-of-living crisis has really impacted the service as over the past seven years demand for meals and goody bags has doubled. Coupled with this is the price of food has increased the organisation is having to raise more money per service user year on year.

However, each year the RDS lets the organisation use its facilities and kitchen free of charge, which Trevor said enables the organisation to support as many people as it does.

The organisation raises money through its website christmasdaydinner.com as well as receiving corporate donations.