Hello and welcome to Gimmie Space, a programme about radical independent social centres
brought to you by RAG and DCTV.
Today we're going to be looking at two such social centres in Ireland.
First we'll visit Shomer Spree, Dublin's social centre, located in the north of the city,
and then we'll head west of the Shannon for a look at the Galway social space.
I'll then be joined in the studio by two organisers from these centres to have a bit more of a chat about what's involved.
Shomer Spree was founded in and around 2004 when a group of people in the city got together
to organise a community, commercial free space for the city.
Several years on from those initial meetings and the project is going from strength to strength.
We visited the social centre in its current location just off Mentjoy Square to take a look
and to chat to some of those people involved.
Shomer Spree has been going for around three and a half years now, I've been involved for around two.
I got involved when we had a building on Mary's Abbey which was from June 2007.
Before that, Shomer Spree was located in a building on Abbey Street, which an artist owned.
They just had a small room there where they had different kinds of projects, cultural activities and meetings and so on.
But eventually that room was too small for the project as it attracted more attention
and they moved out and got a bigger space on the keys, or on the key I think it was.
And then when the lease ran up on that, they moved to Mary's Abbey which is when I got involved.
And we were in Mary's Abbey for around six months which was a really great time for Shomer Spree
because there was a really intense amount of different activities and stuff going on.
It was really vibrant in those six months that we were there.
And then unfortunately we lost that space and it was quite difficult to find a place in the city
that was affordable and that was suitable for what we wanted to do with the project.
But eventually we found a place where we currently are.
Welcome to Shomer Spree, slash four.
So this is the fourth building of Shomer Spree and we're in Timbavadir Court
which is just off Gardner Street in the northeast inner city of Dublin.
We're about five minutes from McCombs Street.
Well Shomer Spree is really just a building at the end of the day.
But what makes it different is the way things are done here.
So it's a space that people can use for basically any kind of social, political or cultural activity.
But it's a space that's managed democratically by a collective where everybody has an equal say.
And it's not run in order to generate profit like 90% of the places in the city.
It's run in order to respond to what people's needs and what people want.
So we organise, so the building is basically run by a collective who meet up once a week
to kind of talk about what needs to be done to make sure the building is still here.
There's so much space in the city owned by business and business types of space.
It's really important to have social space after all or more social creatures than business creatures.
The reason I got involved in Shomer Spree, my boyfriend actually was involved two years ago
and he's spoken about it and I know some friends were involved in some stuff.
And it was actually my newest resolution to be less bored.
So I emailed one of the guys about coming down and helping to make vegan and veggie stuff
because I make a lot of vegan foods and I make vegetarian stuff but I mainly try to do vegan.
And I know they had a veggie cafe so I asked him if I could help out and he said yeah, come down.
So I came down last Thursday and said actually this is only my second week.
And I'm just trying to get involved in whatever's going on basically.
One of the most important things about Shomer Spree is accessibility.
We try to facilitate different groups of people, depending on their background, gender,
or sexual preference, or religion, or race, or political outlook to some extent.
We try to dissuade people from engaging in partly political stuff in here.
We want to be grassroots based and work on a non-hierarchical basis.
We're in the yard and I like to start off the tour because pretty much almost every day
when someone comes in we give a tour of the space.
And I like to start off the tour in the yard quite often because it's really hard to find
a space in the city where you have some outside space.
And we spent maybe nine months trying to find the perfect building for the Shomer Spree
after we lost our last space.
And so here we have a space and we're going to transform this into a garden
and have some space for working on bikes.
My favourite project at the moment I'm involved in trying to get up off the ground
is a bike workshop.
Well we're both involved at RAG, the Revolutionary and Arcafeminist Group,
who produce the magazine each year.
Probably somewhere there behind us.
And I guess RAG chooses Shomer because it's a place which is accessible to everybody.
It's a space that we can use for free or for a small donation.
It kind of encourages community groups and sort of groups of people who want to kind of
take ownership of the city basically and make space for themselves.
A lot of my experiences working in life have been very demoralising
and depressing basically.
But being involved in Shomer Spree is very inspiring
because when you're working with people purely because you have a similar ideas
and you have a similar idea of the way things should be done.
When you're working for people just on the basis of kind of solidarity
in a collective way that's democratic where everybody can kind of have their say.
When that works well it's very inspiring.
When it works badly it's very frustrating.
Shomer Spree has a safer space policy.
It's an acknowledgement of some of the problems that exist in society.
And then secondly it's kind of like a statement that sort of draws attention
to some of this behaviour and to say that actually we're trying to create a space
where we stimulate people to think about these kind of things,
think about how your behaviour impacts on other people,
to be aware of other people's kind of boundaries,
other people's kind of space.
And just to kind of an acknowledgement of the fact that people are really different
and can experience things really differently.
So just to urge people to be sensitive towards each other.
We're part of a group of parents that got together to do a DIY school.
We wanted a DIY because we're not happy with the national school system.
And certainly not with children as young as four-year-olds here sitting down
learning his letters and numbers.
And when he has ability and capability to be something more
and different right now in his life.
So us parents got together to provide that.
One of the main aspects of Shomer Spree is to be as autonomous as possible.
Which is quite difficult in a city like Dublin.
Because every space in Dublin is basically rented at the market value.
Which is very high in Dublin.
So we have to pay quite a significant size of rent.
So unfortunately we're dictated by having to raise that money for the rent.
The first time I came to Shomer Spree was actually just for the cafe.
And it was really, I just like learned a lot about it on the day.
I thought it was really amazing.
And it was only until recently getting more involved in RAG
that I started coming more.
And it's really, really great.
So just such a positive thing and like we're saying it's such a supportive of RAG.
One of the first things I got involved in in Shomer Spree was like electronic resistance.
We're playing records, I had a fundraiser for, I think it was the Columbia anti-cow campaign.
There's been a lot of kids based courageous people bringing their kids in and like a play area set up.
And we have a table tennis table, played table tennis and chill out early, relax and drink tea.
The main groups that have been using the space up till now have been basically mainly sort of grassroots action-based campaigning groups.
Examples would be Shell to Sea, Glueshark.
There's a new group, a climate camp group, getting ready to organize a climate camp this year.
There's been the workers solidarity movement, which is the main anarchist group in Ireland and RAG, revolutionary anarchist feminists.
Well, we're both part of RAG, the revolutionary anarcho-feminist group.
And I'm also part of a new group in Shomer Spree called Queer Spree, which is like an initiative for sort of queer alternative space
and for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, transgender, the whole spectrum of identities
who want to seek alternative sort of social events and activities and discussion spaces and film nights and all sorts of activities like that.
And RAG has been involved with Shomer for years, I think, from the very beginning.
I got involved with the Shomer Spree project because, for me, it's a very important part of activism
as a kind of a base for activists and campaigning groups to have some sort of social fabric as part of the activist scene, so to speak.
So I think it's important to provide resources and space for groups to meet in, to be able to organise and develop their campaigns and stuff.
So that was Dublin's Shomer Spree.
In the summer of 2009, the Galway social space opened its doors for the first time and the city hasn't been the same since.
We headed to Galway to see what all the fuss was about.
Nearly a year and a half ago, that group was got together and we felt there was need for a social centre in Galway
and there was nothing remotely like it at all, just a space where we can all come together and just hang and bounce ideas off each other
and create all these classes and workshops and meetings and stuff.
One of the main ways, I think, of community throughout the ages, definitely in Ireland, was always through the church.
But I think it's very important that community can exist outside of the religious place and outside of churches and church halls and this type of thing.
And it's been a great thing in Ireland that we have had that community, but as people now aren't maybe as church-going as it used to be,
or we have a lot of immigrants coming into the country that might not be Catholic or whatever,
I think it's very important that people feel that they can socialise outside of the church community and that doesn't mean going to the pub,
it doesn't mean just hanging out in a café and also that people can have a place that they call their own, that someone can come in
and they know if they want to do, if they want to put up posters, if they want to put up a painting,
or if they want to get involved in a place, the place they can and they can make it their own.
Rather than having a community hall that's run by the government, that you come in and everything comes across very professionally, nice and clean,
but there's never a part of it that's yours. There's never a painting that's up on the wall that's yours.
You're not involved in the running of the place, it's very much, this is the government building.
You come in here, you can rent a room for 20, 30 or an hour, which is the way some of them work.
I arrived to Galway the day the space opened and before moving to Galway, I'd done some research
and I knew there was a Food Not Bombs active here and Food Not Bombs being a group I know and love from the states,
that was a really easy way for me to jump in and so the day I got here I was on the Food Not Bombs website
and it said something about the Galway social space and it was like, come by and have a cup of 24 Middle Street.
There's language co-ops, there's Irish, English, French, Spanish, Welsh, I don't know what else, other language co-ops,
there's all kinds of arts, there's exhibitions, there's theatre, there's music going on,
there's the purple room which is kind of the holistic room, there's loads of massages,
aromatherapies, holistics, then there's the campaign groups that are here, the Food Not Bombs, the Zebra World,
Shell to Sea Meet sometimes and then there's just a whole brand new, people realise that they now have a space
that they can start their own clubs or just cycling campaigns or anything that comes into the mind pops up here
because now there's a space to do it. The ethos of the space is it's a non-hierarchy,
it's no profit, no religion, corporate, government influences, it's pretty much anybody can come in at any stage
and have as much say as anyone that's been here for any length of time before and it's very open door policy,
community feel about it. I just think it's really important to have spaces for people together
where they're not a customer and they don't have to pay to be there.
The funding really comes from the community so we have a café where we serve teas and coffees
and we ask for a donation of a euro each and amazingly that actually brings in a lot of money during the day.
The different groups then would leave, we would ask them to leave a donation
and try and recommend a donation that we think they should leave so we're not just getting a handful of change
and that people respect the place and what it represents.
Two degrees of separation they say in Galway like you know everybody knows somebody pretty much like
but it's good, it's very good for the space because where the mouth gets around you can reach the other community groups
very quickly, there's good support for the fundraisers, there's good support for just dropping in
in the space on any given day. Galway is great because it is a city but still it has the small town community feel about it
and that's transforming into the space as well.
One of the main folks is when we were setting up the place, the main idea of the place was Skillshare
that as many skills would be shared as possible.
Every day you're in here that you have something to learn and you have something to teach
and I think that's the most important thing but as long as you're comfortable here
and you're free to do what you want and be part of the community, be part of yourself
and just be happy within the space and I saw that's the main thing, just comfort in your, it's your space
so be comfortable in your space.
It's good to use buildings to bring people together and there's a lot of wasted buildings out there
and there's a lot of communities that can be brought together so I suppose the hope is that it creates a feeling
that there is a sense of community out there so just grab it and put it in a building.
So that was the Galway social space.
I'm now joined in studio by Mark Malone from Shomer Spree and Cormac Anderson from the Galway social space.
You're both very welcome to the show.
So first Mark, Shomer Spree has been on the go in one form or another since about 2004
as an independent radical social centre and radical independent social centres are just one type.
You know, lots of others for example being church or community or sport centres.
So where does the independent social centre like Shomer Spree or the Galway space have its roots
and where did the initial idea come from to set up Shomer Spree?
I know from the experience of Shomer Spree it kind of came from initially people working together
organising protests against the EU summit in 2004
and we kind of had a collective recognition that Dublin really lacked a kind of social centre
that exists in a lot of spaces in the UK or different cities right across Europe
that were kind of organised non-hierarchically and created spaces for people to experiment within the city
both culturally and also providing resources for people within campaigns and stuff like that
so that would be the initial kind of idea.
So Cormac, what about in Galway? Where did the initial idea come from to set up the space?
I suppose as Mark said many of us would have travelled and we would have seen how the Forest Cafe in Edinburgh
was an off-sided example or also the Cowley Cut Club in Brighton.
Also the experience of a lot of us would have seen squats a bit in Spain or Italy or the Netherlands or Germany
and we kind of saw a lack of a suitable space in Galway
for creativity and also for campaigns and stuff like that.
I think also specifically in our case it was in response to a very clear need within our city
for kind of a forum or a space where that creativity could find an outlet.
I think in Galway there was a number of arts groups and theatre groups, for example,
Mark, who maybe 25 years ago would have provided that kind of outlet for the creative forces which are there
and in some ways we felt that they'd kind of become middle aged and that we had to do something new from the bottom up.
So I suppose it was in one sense a reaction to the kind of specific needs of the community as we saw them
and also to a certain extent imported from outside in that we'd seen how places might have worked
and these sort of independent social centres might have worked in other places
and kind of wanted to emulate to a certain degree that model here in Ireland.
So are there many such independent social centres in Ireland?
And if there are, are you linked in any way or networking together in any way?
There's a few, I mean the history of Ireland, there's been some spaces that have existed before
certainly Jarrows and Belfast would have been one, Kaz and Cork, both now of which aren't open at the minute.
As far as I know in terms of Lincoln, there was the first kind of Irish social centres gathering last year
which brought together people from the Galway space, ourselves in Shulmar Spree,
also people from Belfast, from Leetrim I think as well, from Cork.
There is a group up in Ballonmore in Leetrim who have very nice small social centre up there
and while there's no formal links or anything like that, there is an informal level,
there would be a certain amount of communication going on.
I think as well we try as much as possible to kind of share the experiences that we have
and make that kind of knowledge and information available to other people who might be interested
in doing similar projects so that there's a kind of shared generation of knowledge out there.
I think certainly for us, I say we took inspiration from other places in the continent etc etc
but we were also quite aware of Shulmar Spree and people came down and talked to us about it as well.
Now the model that we set up was different in some ways
but we had also quite consciously looked at what Shulmar Spree and kind of took
the aspects of that model that we thought would actually work in Galway as well
and it's also written into our aims and principles that we will try and support other ventures
of a similar nature elsewhere in the country or elsewhere even within our own city.
Okay, so as we've seen in both films, both of your groups strongly emphasise
what's called non-hierarchical or horizontal organising.
Can you tell us a bit about why this is so important to your respective projects?
Yeah, well I suppose for us that happened quite organically in that it was a group of us that got together
but I also think it's important for other reasons.
One that in Galway because there's quite a lot of students, there's quite a lot of foreigners,
we've got quite a turnover of population, it's quite transient
so if there's that open door policy and as anybody can come in
it means that it kind of keeps some sort of continuity that there's always somebody there to keep the place open.
From another perspective I think it's actually very important to organise in that way
because that's in some way what sets us aside from, as you said earlier,
church groups or as was said in the video, maybe something which is run by the state
because when people actually organise and feel that they can run a space like this
they feel that they own it, they feel the ownership of it
and I think that that's a very important basis for community empowerment,
this idea of that I use this space therefore I have the responsibility,
there's also a sense of civic responsibility and personal responsibility
towards the other people involved and towards the space itself
and I think that organising in that democratic, non-hierarchical way
aside from the ideological questions, it also can be a very effective way of organising.
I think part of that as well, an echo what Cormac said,
part of that as well is the quite strong anti-authoritarian principles
that lay behind notions of genuine democracy and participation
and I think there's quite strong currents both within social centre movements
right across Europe and the global south
but also the larger sort of milieu, political milieu that they exist within
to support, to facilitate and certainly within elements of notions of creativity
is like extremely needs to be like non-authoritarian
and enabling both individual participation to the fullest potential
and then sort of collective realisation of different projects
that come from that kind of dynamic of working.
OK, so it's clear that there's a lot of benefits
and you talked about self-empowerment and community empowerment
and being involved in organising these social centres.
What about some of the challenges of being involved in these kind of projects?
There's a few challenges, I guess the first being
for a lot of people you're doing something completely new
that you're kind of, it's an experiment to some degree or other.
You kind of take on as much as you can the kind of lessons and experiences of other places
and the knowledge that's been generated beforehand by others.
One of the things I would find difficult sometimes
is kind of the internal work and dynamics of creating
like democratic decision-making processes
particularly within forms of consensus-making or decision-making processes
that are more challenges perhaps rather than massive pitfalls
but it's work, you know, we kind of recognise it as productive, useful work.
I mean there's always certain financial issues,
there's the question of when we do have this turnover of people
which has happened like I mean most of the original collective
that would have set up the space and go away
have moved on now and are living elsewhere
or at least a good proportion of them.
So there is this challenge of keeping renovated,
keeping new people coming in, getting people to volunteer
and also that thing about actually making decisions in a group like that
and that can be quite long and time-consuming process, you know.
Do you find that that's a new experience for many people
who get involved in your social centres?
Yeah, I think from this perspective of Shonwa Spree
there's like several different kind of projects going on within the space.
So I think people would get introduced to the ideas of the space
in a very different way.
Some of the ways we try to overcome that is to make stuff
as kind of open and explicit about setting out the processes of working groups,
which groups take responsibility for what aspects of running of the space
and stuff like that.
And I think you have to approach this with a very genuine understanding
that people are coming from different perspectives
even though they might come from very similar kind of basic philosophies
of like having a different vision for how society is organised, for example,
that people come from different places and have different experiences
that are all equally valid and it's kind of creating means and mechanisms
to capture that there.
Mark, when Shonwa Spree started out, you started out quite small
and you started off doing sort of one-off events
and the project has evolved quite a lot from where you came from initially, hasn't it?
Yeah, it kind of had different kind of focuses.
Initially we started out, we didn't have a space, we didn't have any money,
we just had a desire to create a kind of space.
So we started off doing one-off events.
People kind of, it was a small enough bunch of people like organising those,
but we got a lot of support from outside in terms of people supporting the idea
and financial donations, which kind of give us the impetus and sort of the suggestion
that actually there is a desire and a need for this, you know.
And I think we've tried to be as stable as possible
even though we've had our ups and downs and we've kind of kept running with it
and more and more people have kind of drawn in, some people have kind of fallen back
and that's the ebb and flow of activity I guess as well.
But yeah, it's become quite stable now and it's quite a central part
of the fabric of what's going on I think in the city.
So have you any advice or words of wisdom for somebody
who's interested in setting up their own social space
or where do you think they should start?
Well, I suppose from our experience, I'd encourage anybody to do it.
It's a very kind of enriching process.
I think I mean it's important maybe to start small
and not to try and go for something big from the...
and then maybe get disappointed.
I also think it's quite important to get a group of people working together
that it's not just one or two people who are running the show
and then if there's personality conflicts or somebody moves on
that the whole project falls down.
To try and make it something sustainable where there's a group of people,
a collective working together and that way the responsibilities
and the work is shared out more equally
and also that you've got a wide variety of skills that you can draw on as well
and that also helps to kind of the people bring along their friends
and it draws in the local community in a whole different way
rather than just one or two people that go off on their own and decide to do this.
So I'd say to try and get a good group together
and like I'd say to come to us and go away,
get in touch with us or get in touch with them.
In the show mode that's very much part of our ethos
would be to encourage other projects.
There's actually this one group in Galway in the west side
who are talking about setting up a similar type of project as well
and would be encourage them every step of the way
any way we can be it in terms of resources or in terms of expertise
or anything at all really.
I'd also say be ambitious, like don't be afraid to feel,
don't be afraid to make mistakes and things not work out
and kind of stick with the ideas
and yeah I think like networking, like find out, talk to people
but yeah, be ambitious like if you want to reimagine a city
it's only going to come from people starting to do it themselves.
So I'd like to thank both of you very much for coming along to today's show
and sharing your experience and of the wonderful things that are happening
within these independent social centres.
So for more information on either Shomer Spree or the Galway social centre
check out the links that are displayed on the screen at the end of the show.
Thank you.
