The group is doing well here in County Kildare. We unveiled our new community garden recently -- "Bia Linn," or "Our Food" -- and bit by bit we have accumulated tools, earth, plants, seeds and people. Some members of our group came in with wood and nails, and hammered together garden beds. One person brought a water barrel, one a composter, several brought laundry-sized planting tubs. Bord na Mona, the Irish fuel company, donated tonnes of topsoil, and our chair carved a wooden sign for the entrance.
My FADA colleague Ciara Bennett has done an amazing job organising the facility, and already, just a few weeks into the project, the place is covered in beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, cabbages and blackcurrant bushes. Ciara was on the local radio station's chat show talking about it, I also did an interview for the news, and we've had several newspaper articles and columns already.
We will be hosting another Feile na Samhna (Halloween Festival) this year -- the last one was a great success, bringing many area residents in to meet local beekeepers, weavers, growers, alternative teachers, and so on. It managed to combine the festive (puppet shows for the kids, craft workshops, dancing, indie films) with the serious (talks and community discussions of peak oil, climate change and the coming hard times). Those things might seem incompatible, but they blended well -- a student theater group, for example, presented short plays about post-peak life, like James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, but sunnier.
Other people in FADA will be refining the 2020 show -- a fake newscast from County Kildare in the future, after a small but critical mass of people have made a few simple changes. It's a funny and inspiring antidote to the doomer view of the future -- I'll post it here when it's ready. I'll also post the new web site here as soon as it's done.
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