by Cian Curran
Introduction

I left architecture, partly in disgust, partly in fear, after a mere eighteen months in the business. I got out because I knew that we couldn’t keep building like this any longer and that we had too many architects. Unfortunately the field I chose to migrate to is even less likely to survive than the one I left. I followed a long standing dream to get into the space industry and I made a mistake. I have to accept that. When Ireland decided to follow the dream of year on year economic growth, each of us with our own house with our own back garden and our own car, we made a mistake. And we have to accept that. The reason I’m telling you this is the same reason I went to Cloughjordan this past Mayday – our world as we’ve known it, is gone.

Peak Oil

What we have done to this economy is just a symptom of what this economy is doing to our world – running it into the ground. We have traded sustainability for exponential growth, resilience for global trade and travel. The reason Cloughjordan is so important is the same reason that I will most likely never work in my chosen industry, the economies of the world have collapsed. Peak oil, for anybody who hasn’t been following it, is the end of cheap oil. And the end of cheap oil is the end of large supermarkets, the end of bananas in Ireland and the end of your twice annual trip to your Villa in Portugal. It is the end of the industrialised world’s race to expand into every corner of the planet and to consume every last resource. On the 1st May coffee drinkers from all around the country convened at Síle na gCioch coffee house on Main street in Cloughjordan Co. Tipperary for the Green Open Coffee Club meeting for the month of May. This was my first ever Open Coffee meeting and I must say that I was greatly impressed. Without knowing that it would serve as prelude for the theme for the day, I spent the whole car journey down from Galway spreading my doom and gloom about the economy and the country and how we are not doing anything to dig ourselves out.Thankfully though the conversation on the return leg would turn out to be quite the opposite.

Cloughjordan

Cloughjordan county Tipperary is a little village in the middle of the country. Once upon a time every little village looked in a very fundamental way like Cloghjordan, with the buildings addressing the main streets and squares and the farm houses out the road on the farms. Today though there are not so many villages or towns left that way. We have doubled their footprint and decentralised their urban centres by building terrible supermarkets and oversized, under facilitated housing estates on the outskirts. Cloughjordan however, fair play to them, built an eco village.

Sheelagh Na Gig

My first ever Open Coffee meeting kicked off mid morning in the intimate and absolutely lovely Sheelagh Na Gig (Síle Na gCíoch) café on Main street just opposite the Protestant church. There was coffee and people and chat and then more coffee and more people and, well, more chat. I knew nobody apart from my gracious chauffeur for the day, Ina O Murchú, and so sat there quietly and listened in the hope that I would understand something somebody would say. By the time we were standing up to leave for the eco village what must have been over an hour later, there were people and coffee everywhere and I was wedged somewhere between buying a pig from an energy specialist up the road and building a customisable house for another fella who had had it up to here with the whole construction industry. I was buzzing!

The Eco village

The eco village at Cloughjordan has a very definite energy about it. After about two hours of talking about the state of the economy and end of the world I was exhausted. When they said that the eco village was in the middle of the village I expected at least a ten or fifteen minute walk to the centre but about ninety seconds later we were there. When you approach the front gate of the complex a waft of history and I have to say even anxiety came down on me, history because I realised that as the first of its kind, Cloughjordan will likely be held aloft as the father of the 21st century resilient community. In fifty years, the country will be filled with Cloughjordans. I say anxiety because as you walk through the hoarding and see the surprisingly large skeleton of the hostel building that heralds your arrival, I realised that all this talk about peak oil, resilience and climate change is real. It was crystallised for me that day in seeing the this very physical and real response to it.

Food Production & Resilience

Apart from the absolutely terrible taste and quality of nearly all of the food we get from the supermarkets, there is only about four days worth of the stuff there. If the other two and a half to three weeks worth of food stockpiled in our depots were to run out, we run out. Because we import something like eighty percent of our food, we are only ever about three weeks away from hunger. This is a very, very serious problem. Prolonged oil shocks due to war in the Middle East or due to peak oil will severely stress our ability to feed ourselves.

Once upon a time every town and village in Ireland had the ability to feed itself. Today however with centralisation and globalisation we as a country don’t grow any more than a percentage of the food we need. The Cloughjordan eco village plans to be able to produce a significant amount of its own food, on site with the ability to source the remainder elsewhere locally. There are community allotments within the boundary of the village itself and a community farm a mile and a half down the road. This is significant.

Elements of Sustainability & Resilience

Sustainability has become such a buzz word I’m having trouble even remembering what it means (going forward!). Cloughjordan is sustainable because its principal energy sources are both renewable and local. It will eventually produce a lot of the food needed to sustain its population itself and it cherishes community and interaction. Unlike practically everything else we have built in this country since the nineties.
Resilience is the measure by which a system can withstand external shocks. Galway’s resilience is low, Dublin’s’ resilience is low, Ireland’s’ resilience is low. The principles embraced by the Cloughjordan eco village are central to redundancy and resilience. They will be able to produce significant amounts of their own food, their own power, their own heat and their own business. One of the key tenets of resilience and sustainability is the commodity ‘mile’. The shorter the physical distance between your food source or your energy source and you, the more secure it is. If your food or energy has to travel large distances to get to you, the chances of it getting lost en route are much higher than if you had it already on site. If you’re relying on oil to transport your food and energy to you in the age of the end of cheap oil, then the cost of food and energy is going to significantly increase and the capability to get it from source to end user decreases.

Technology & Practices

This is not Santa’s workshop. It does not run on magic. Although you would ideally aim for perfection (or as close to it as possible) in everything you do, this is not a 100% eco-maniacal building site. Because that’s exactly what it is, a building site. The builders aren’t wearing Birkenstock sandals or shunning heavy machinery in favour of asses and carts (although we did see some arses!). However the construction workers are encouraged to adhere to ecologically friendly construction practices (energy efficiency etc.) as much as is practicable in today’s world. The settlement is to have a community heating system that will use the largest Solar Thermal Array in the country and Woodchip burning furnaces to provide the heating and hot water to all one hundred and thirty two houses in the settlement.

I had a look at some woodchip aggregate blocks that were being used to form the envelope of a house on one of the sites. While remarkably light to lift, these blocks, when filled with bog standard concrete will provide the required structural integrity and enclosure to keep the rain out and the heat in. Like with the concrete block hostel, this building with its matrix of concrete (which is inherently high in embodied energy) are not as eco-friendly as the designers might have liked it to be. But this is not a college project, this is the reality of building construction in Ireland today. And between current building regulations and the economics of building in Ireland, it’s good enough.

Of course Cloughjordan wouldn’t be able to hold itself up as a model of sustainable development if it didn’t have Hemp and Cob somewhere in the scheme, which it does in at least three lovely houses down towards the back of the residential area. Now these are nice technologies don’t get me wrong, they are the moral choice and the expression of an environmentally responsible attitude but I personally am less interested in the initial carbon footprint of the building materials than I am in the community planning, transport, food and energy systems. As it is here that the problems for every Irish village, town and city really lie. There are buildings enough in place, the resilience however is not.

On the other hand if Cloughjordan is going to be an inspiration to all the other villages and towns in the country over the coming decades, it might as well be ecologically friendly too!

Urban Planning

The eco village is planned in such a way as to encourage small clusters of residents in little neighbourhoods. The residential developments, the enterprise centre, the allotments and the power stations are all mutually supportive in their positioning on the site. The streets are designed to encourage pedestrian and bicycle traffic which in turn will discourage vehicular traffic. This all contributes to a happier, more active community.

The Feeling – Come Back in Twenty Years

My feeling upon entering the eco village was one of trepidation as I said due to the fact that the coming crisis was suddenly given form. After all, the very reason for the Cloughjordan eco village is the fact that every other settlement in the country is at it stands, naked. And the temperature is plummeting. When I was leaving though I was for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the future of our land. Although I am still coming to terms with what I figure is the end of my fantastic dreams of working with spaceships and little green men, a clearer and more solid future is starting to emerge.
I would like to go back in twenty years when there are children playing among the trees, when the solar arrays are harvesting the sun and there are cart loads of vegetables being delivered to the enterprise centre for lunch. It will take an awful lot of effort and it will not be easy, but when the rest of the country finally comes around to embracing and implementing the principles so taken up at Cloughjordan, that very name will have earned its place right down there at the base of the family tree of the newly resilient Ireland.

By putting me in touch with people who are refusing to let depression get the better of them, and by providing me with a reason to go to Cloughjordan, Open Coffee Galway and indeed the Open Coffee Club movement in general has helped me to get my positivity back. It has shown me that there is a future in this country and that it is in fact already here. It has shown me the community is out there, and that all I have to do is show up.