https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/10/paradise-lost-what-happened-to-irelands-model-eco-village

Paradise lost? What happened to Ireland's model eco-village

Killian FoxFri 10 Aug 2018 01.00 EDT

It was conceived as a model for environmental living in the 21st century – a self-governing eco-village which would be communal, carbon-neutral and self-sufficient.

The plans for Cloughjordan, a settlement in the heart of Ireland, provided for a working farm, solar power, an “edible landscape” and district heating. There would be 130 plots for homes on a 67-acre site and some communal ownership.

Then, 10 years ago this month came the financial crisis. “In 2008, there were deposits on every site,” says Davie Philip, one of the founders. “Then, with the crash, we lost all our staff and 50% of our deposits.”

Ten years later, it is remarkable that Cloughjordan is still soldiering on. Harsh lessons have been learned and this is certainly no utopia. But locals are adamant that they are the pioneers of a low-carbon economy and that the world can learn from their example.

In all, 55 houses have been built on the 130 sites, with another 20 sites sold. The sustainable heating, drainage and sewage systems have had problems, leading to some ecological compromises, but the basic infrastructure works.

And though it may not be fully self-sufficient, the village has a working farm, an array of well-tended polytunnels and a bakery providing the community with good food year round.

Philip, a Scotsman who moved to Ireland 25 years ago and now lives on Cloughjordan’s main street, takes me on a tour.

“Things are always a bit messy here because we have to do everything ourselves,” he says. “There are no municipal services, so we have to cut the grass, keep it clean, plant bushes and apple trees. This isn’t the market square that we envisaged, but it’s still used in various ways.”

Some of the houses are self-built – Philip points out a hobbitish “hand-sculpted” dwelling with a roof made of recycled plastic “slates” – while others are contract-built.

They are kept warm by the district heating system up the hill, whose boilers are powered by wood chips from an Irish sawmill. Behind it is a big field of solar panels, which Philip admits has not worked properly since it was installed in 2008.

“The company that installed it went bust in the recession, so there was no recourse,” he says. As a result, the community has had to rely on mains electricity to drive the pumps.

Across the road, in his RED (Research Education Development) garden, Bruce Darrell stresses the importance of growing one’s own food in an uncertain world.

“I’m at the doomer end of the spectrum, I’m not a utopian,” he says, showing me the plots where he has been experimenting with various approaches to growing, including the “no-dig” method. “This is about resilience. It’s about how to get by in a resource-constrained future.”

“When the diesel runs out, we’ll be ready,” says farmer Pat Malone cheerfully. Today he has connected his plough to a tractor but “as often as we can” his team employs horses.

“We’re combining old practices with new equipment,” he says. “Horses provide dung and they disturb the soil much less than tractors. The challenge working with horses is to create time. For that, you need more people. We want to bring people back on to the land.”

Similar sentiments are expressed by Joe Fitzmaurice and Julie Lockett at Riot Rye bakery. “We’re going back to the old system of bakeries, where the amount of bread you produced was limited by how far a [delivery] horse could travel,” says Fitzmaurice. Their wood-fired oven restricts output to 350 loaves a week and they supplement their income by running baking classes.

The eco-village allows people to put ideas of low-impact living into practice and to promote them to the wider world. What’s harder, it becomes clear, is keeping the community itself happy.

“When I arrived, I thought the work was to bring a lot of approaches – green building, permaculture, renewable energy – together in a community,” says Philip. “Now I see the real work, in every community, is how do we cooperate when we have different values and world views?”

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At Cloughjordan, rather than relying on (and being failed by) distant administrative bodies, the residents do all the work themselves – from governance to lawn-mowing. This requires a huge amount of collective effort and no small amount of diplomacy.

“You need to be a good communicator,” says Lockett. “You’re engaging on a lot more levels. We’re tied together financially, which leads to different conversations with neighbours – people don’t usually talk about money.”

Decision-making happens on a consensus basis; a number of groups and subgroups have been set up to cover areas such as education, land use and development.

It can be complicated and often frustrating, but, as resident academic Peadar Kirby says: “What’s the alternative? Give all the power to the board? This governance structure allows a huge amount of creativity to flourish.”

Many who consider themselves part of the project, including Philip, live in the old village of Cloughjordan nearby.

“Some people in the pub will give out about us after a few drinks, but that’s to be expected,” Philip says. He points out that the population of Cloughjordan has increased, while many other Irish country villages are losing residents, so schools are better attended and staffed as a result.

The biggest challenge, says Philip, is getting more young people involved. “We were in our 30s when we started, but we’re not that young anymore,” he says ruefully. “We need to make it easier for young people to come here, buy plots and build” and contribute to the community. He cites co-housing schemes as one possible way forward here.

When I ask another of the founder-residents, the journalist Iva Pocock, if the success of Cloughjordan depends on whether it is replicated elsewhere, she shakes her head.

“The idea that we’re going to save the world by people setting up eco-villages is naive.” A better measure of success, she says, is if other communities take on elements of what has been implemented here: the car-sharing scheme, for example, or what Pocock refers to as Cloughjordan’s edible landscape – the fruit bushes, trees and herbs around the village, which anyone can make use of.

Kirby is more bullish. “If the question is: what political system could we design to get to a low-carbon economy? I think we’re modelling that, for all our faults and failures.”

That evening, the sun is out and the market square is aglow. Children are playing, neighbours are chatting, people are out walking their dogs. The grass is unkempt and a few nearby buildings need a lick of paint, but somehow this seems less significant than it did when I arrived.

Cloughjordan has a long way to go, it’s true, but perhaps we should appreciate just how far it has come.

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