At this time each year, we review all the information held on our Parish Registers. To comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we are required to do everything we can to ensure that the data we hold is accurate and up to date.  We would like to seek your help in doing this.

Many of you will, by now, have received and responded to our request to complete and return the Parish Register Information form. We are very grateful to everybody who has managed to do this, and appreciate that others will have it on their ‘to do’ list.

At the start of lockdown one of the challenges we faced was finding contact details for parishioners across our three faith communities. Our parish registers were out-of-date. In the weeks that followed we worked through a number of different sources and pulled together contact details for as many parishioners as we could. We realised, however, that despite our efforts there were numerous parishioners we didn’t have any details whatsoever for.

 We have done our best, through the Cluster website and the weekly Cluster News, to keep in touch with and provide liturgy resources for as many people as we could make contact with. Recognising that many people do not have email or internet access, we have also made these liturgy resources available through a dedicated telephone line. 

 Using the different sources we mentioned earlier, we managed to find some type of contact detail for around 300 households across the three parishes. We have emailed or written to each of these households and asked them to complete and return the Parish Register Information form.

 We are entering all of this information into our Cluster Database. Having this database will ensure that we have up-to-date contact details for as many parishioners as possible. While this will help us keep in touch during this time when we continue to live with Covid-19, it will also be very important when we come to whatever the new normal will be in terms of post-Covid parish life. The database has functionality that will enable us to contact people by email and text message (everybody will, of course, be able to choose to opt out of being contacted by these means). Having landline phone numbers and postal addresses will facilitate communication with parishioners with no internet, email or mobile phone.

 While you may have completed and returned the Parish Register Information form for your household, we would ask you to share this form with any parishioners you know, especially those who do not have email or internet access. This might mean that some parishioners are given the form two or three times, but we think this is better than risking them not receiving it at all. This is the link to the online form - Parish Register Form. It only takes between 5 and 10 minutes, on average, to complete it. A paper version of the form is attached and can be downloaded and printed.

 In every age, being able to communicate is crucial, but the situation we have lived with these past few months has made it more important than ever. 

 To conclude, as we have said two or three times, we are especially mindful of those without email or internet access. Many parishioners have shared with us that they informally keep in touch with other parishioners and keep them up-to-date with what is happening - we are very grateful for that. We would encourage everybody to think about whether there is a parishioner they know who might welcome contact and news about the parishes. Although we are putting a lot of effort into creating an up-to-date database, and this is vitally important, there is nothing to substitute for person-to-person contact.

Gerry Mulvenna, on behalf of the Strategy Group