Ireland Yearly Meeting will be held on 25 – 27 April 2025 at Friends School Lisburn. (Ireland Junior Yearly Meeting will be held just before, on 17 – 21 April 2025 at Newtown School Waterford. You can find out more about JYM 2025 here.)

Here is a link to the latest available IYM 2025 programme (23 April 2025).

Here is a map of the main part of the ground floor of Friends School Lisburn showing the locations of IYM activities.

Registering and Booking Meals for IYM 2025

You can register for IYM 2025 using this registration link. You can register up to three adults and three children using this form.

Note that the meal booking deadline has now passed. There may be a small number of meals available, for example, due to cancellations. If you want to find out if it is possible for you to book meals, please email office@quakers.ie.

Accommodation

Due to the nature of the IYM venue, on-site accommodation is unfortunately not available. Therefore Friends will need to make their own arrangements regarding accommodation for IYM. To help with this, here is a guide to accommodation near Friends School Lisburn.

Transportation to IYM 2025

These files with travel information and a local Lisburn map should help you plan your travel to IYM 2025. We hope you’ll try to come by public transportation if you can, or perhaps consider sharing a ride by car.

Note that you may have to download the files indicated above in order for the links embedded in them to work.

Here is a map with parking information for those coming by car.

Volunteering to help at IYM 2025

There are a lot of jobs to be done at IYM 2025 – collecting meal tickets, being a roving microphone steward, helping at the fundraising and book stalls and more. Most of these jobs don’t require any previous experience, and you’ll be given clear instructions about what to do. Anyone who would like to help out at IYM 2025 should fill out this volunteer form to let us know how you’d like to help.

Special Interest Groups

As in previous years, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) will be held online in the days leading up to IYM 2025. These online sessions will give Friends the opportunity to discuss issues of interest, explore concerns and topics of interest to them.

Please note: There will be two evening SIGs this year. They will be run using the same Zoom link as for the plenary sessions of IYM

1. Monday, 21 April 2025, 19:30 – 21:00 (GMT, Irish time)

Co-creating a Utopian Quaker school (Dorothee P-D)

This is an invitation to Friends for a utopian thinking process aimed at co-creating an ideal Quaker School. Utopian thinking fosters critical analysis of what exists, creativity, and forward thinking regarding what could be.

During the session, Friends will be invited to design, in small groups, an ideal school grounded in Quaker testimonies, share their vision with the wider group, and draw insights to help bridge the gaps between reality and a potential desired future for Quaker education.

2. Wednesday, 23 April, 19:30 – 21:00 (GMT, Irish time)

As membership of the Society of Friends dwindles ever further, is it possible to reconcile the culture of Irish Friends, and commitment to silent worship, with the possibility of developing an outward mission for growth. (Patricia Gardiner )

This SIG will look at other Meetings around the world to explore how different Meetings attract new Attenders/Members, and discuss the opportunities in Ireland for changing the dynamic of how we perceive ourselves and how others see us.

Public Lecture

This year’s Public Lecture will be given by James Nelson, a member of South Belfast Quaker Meeting, on the topic Quakers, Learning and Education – Using the Future to Rethink the Present. James is also a senior lecturer in education in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. 

Education and learning have long been concerns for Quakers. They have created formal schools and three continue to operate within a Quaker ethos. Friends have also a core commitment to learning within their community. Indeed, in their Meetings for Worship there is a primacy placed on spoken and silent ‘ministry’. Children and young people take part in learning groups. In many Meeting Houses there are small libraries which members are encouraged to borrow from. Learning or ‘knowing’ is a fundamental part of Quaker ‘being’ and ‘doing’. 

Yet, we live in a world where despite unprecedented access to information, questions about what counts as knowledge or truth continually surface in political, religious and social arenas, often in divisive ways. Education too is rapidly changing in ways that bring both benefits and burdens, hopes and anxieties. With the arrival of AI, for example, there are many new possibilities but it is also fraught with additional dangers.

 How are Quakers in Ireland to position themselves individually or communally in light of these challenges and opportunities? 

 In this lecture, James will consider how Quakers might participate in a reflective process on education and learning using a future-aware approach. If, for example, we anticipate a future in which education and learning play a pivotal role to build interdependence, reduce inequality and reconfigure our relationships to each other and the planet, what might that mean for Quakers in the present? Through reflection on such questions there is an attempt to discern how Quakers in Ireland might continue to evolve their contributions to education and their learning practices while sustaining commitments to their spiritual values and ethical practices.

Please feel free to use this flyer about James Nelson’s Public Lecture to advertise the event both within and outside the Quaker community.

Here is a link you can use to register for the Public Lecture.

But note that you are already registered for the Public Lecture if you are registered for IYM 2025!