In a T-shirt, cap and sturdy gardening boots, Paul Holmes, a community development officer in Bluebell, Dublin 12, waves from a patch of frothy, yellow blossoms. “It’s broccoli going to seed,” he says, “and the flowers are great for the bees.” We are inside the enclosure of The Bungalow Wellness Sanctuary, whose land the Bluebell Community Development Programme has leased from Dublin City Council.
Hundreds of people come to The Bungalow every month to work, to volunteer, for knitting lessons or AA meetings, to learn piano, to garden, or to have a cup of tea. More than a community centre, it is a community awakener, and everybody is welcome.
“Most people don’t even know Bluebell exists,” says Holmes. “We are tucked in here behind big factories, and the Luas just goes right by us, so people just pass us by.”
Bluebell, with a growing population of 2,000 people, has its problems, just like anywhere, says Holmes. “There is antisocial behaviour, drugs and there have been shootings. But you come in here and it’s like an oasis.”
RM Block
The Bungalow is an actual bungalow, a squat cottage sitting on its own parcel of land and tucked away off the main road. It is whitewashed on the outside and made cosy with a coal fire, a piano, squashy cushions and low ceilings on the inside. Other than the newly built recording studio for podcasts and jam sessions in the front room, it has the feeling of a family home, a safe place, as it once was for the keepers of Grand Canal’s fifth lock.
These keepers were responsible for the historic filter beds, swimming pool-sized reserves of water, sometimes called upon by the Guinness factory when their water supplies ran short. But when the beds were decommissioned, the house went empty until the Bluebell programme, led by manager Tommy Coombes, applied to Dublin City Council to lease the site to establish a fishing men’s shed.
“With a fishing men’s shed, you only go together every few weeks to fish. So it was a base where we could progress,” says Holmes. “When we got the keys three years ago, there was nothing here; it was scrubland. Everything you see around you is work we have done ourselves.”
Each project The Bungalow undertakes is based on the skills of the people who arrive through its blue gates. They come from all walks of life, through the Department of Social Protection employment schemes; Tús and Community Employment; through recovery services such as Tiglin; as volunteers; or from the nearby Red Cow international protection centre. For those employed through State schemes, working 19½ hours a week at The Bungalow entitles them to €27.50 a week more than the standard €244 jobseeker’s allowance. For everyone else The Bungalow pays in purpose and a sense of belonging.
Far from scrubland, The Bungalow is now a landscaped haven. There is a tarmac drive, flower beds, a deep fish pond encased by century-old granite slabs rescued from the filter beds, and a vegetable garden that has just been turned over by a Palestinian woman and her husband, who volunteered for a week digging up turnips and potatoes. There are apple trees and plum trees. Red and yellow onions are hanging to dry inside a logshed. A 10m-long polytunnel is full of tomatoes growing so abundantly that it is hard to believe Holmes when he says that they all came from the seedlings of a single tomato and were planted just a few months ago. Cucumbers, parsley, and oregano grow across the rest of the soil. These vegetables provide substance for the staff and volunteers who work here, as well as locals who pop in to see what’s growing and if there is any going spare.
“We don’t get any funding to do this, and most people wonder how we do it,” says Holmes. “Well, most of the cost is labour, and the people that come here are always the right people.”
It’s misfits here; we are a gang of all sorts. We don’t do discrimination
The right people include Kim, a North Korean defector who escaped through China with his son, Adam, a wheelchair user who has cerebral palsy and is employed by the programme through Tús; and Marty, a short-story writer who has found a place for himself at Bluebell after going through a few years of unemployment.
They also include Greg Kelly, a grandfather, who came from the prison system and couldn’t find work anywhere before Bluebell. “I was a bit down; I was a bit depressed. I went through Tús and I had an interview with Tommy. He gave me a chance. I’ve been here for two years now. I wasn’t a nice person; I had a different way. This place has taken institutional buzz off me. I’m decent with my skills, carpentry and building, and I’ve got the responsibility now.”
The Bungalow, says Kelly, is not about perfection; it is about purpose and friendship.
“It’s misfits here; we are a gang of all sorts. We don’t do discrimination. Tommy’s creation is that everybody here is the same,” says Kelly, “and if they don’t like it, they ...”
“Lump it!” His sentence is finished by Terry Gavin, who is sitting beside him.
Gavin, says Kelly with pride, is one of the first people with Down syndrome to be accepted on to the Tús scheme.
“I do a bit of everything here,” says Gavin. “Painting, the pond and everything. It’s great. I do a bit of DJing on a Friday morning at the fry-up breakfast; that is my main thing.”
“He does a great Westlife,” says Kelly.
“Don’t mind him,” Gavin quips back.
There is an expression by poet and philosopher John O’Donohue that community is not built, it is awakened, which comes to mind in Bluebell. O’Donohue writes of the “deep hunger” to belong that exists in our socially fragmented society as many of the traditional places where people found refuge, solace and friendship have been erased, and people are being forced to live ever more isolated lives. But as O’Donohue writes in his 1998 book, Eternal Echoes, “When we come together in compassion and generosity, this hidden belonging begins to come alive between us.”
As Kelly and Gavin head inside to the kitchen to make toasties with fresh cherry tomatoes from the polytunnel, I walk up a wheelchair ramp to see the sanctuary’s other projects, hidden away inside three large shipping containers. The first door, quite magically, opens to reveal a wood-fired eight-seater barrel sauna.
To have a sauna at The Bungalow was a “dream”, says Paul as we sit inside the hot box, which, although unlit, still radiates a sense of warmth. “You’d probably associate saunas with more wealthy, upper-class areas, but a group of us went out to Fad Saoil’s sauna in Greystones through Tiglin and we had a great time. And on the way back, we started talking about having one here. Steve Crosbie, who owns Fad Saoil, came over and met us, and he was amazed at the work that we’re doing here, and he donated the sauna to us.”
Outside, Holmes points out the concrete pathway in front of the sauna, which was laid by a group of Palestinian men from the Red Cow international protection centre, who volunteered their time and in exchange were given community service and a reference that they could use to find other work in time. Other volunteers and staff have built a changing room and a shower room, and the plans for a wooden decking chill-out area are already there.
“We want to make it affordable to people in the area, and to everyone, to come and have a sauna, so it’s going to be around €50 for a group to rent it for a session,” says Holmes. That is roughly half the cost of a private session in a commercially run sauna. “The money will go back into the project, but we’d love to be able to create a job out of it as well; that’s the plan.”
Behind the second shipping container door is a space destined to become an art studio, and behind the third is a fully kitted-out carpentry workshop. A shining golden plaque reads: “In Honour of Neil Soffe, It’s time to make sawdust.” The sign hangs on shelves that hold beautiful chisels and saws with intricately engraved handles.
“It’s a line from the song Monteleone, by Mark Knopfler,” says Marie Soffe as she touches with pride the tools her father, Neil Soffe, once used to build boats. After he died, she faced the task of clearing out his home workshop in Sutton and posted on the Irish Men’s Shed Facebook group asking if anyone would like to come and take his tools.
“It was pure chance that it was Paul who replied,” she says. “But so much has changed in my life because it was.” When a team from Bluebell came to collect the tools, she took Holmes up on his invitation to come out to Bluebell for their weekly Friday fry-up breakfast.
“I was blown away by the place. I couldn’t believe it,” she says. Having left a job in the corporate sector where she’d worked for decades, she had retrained as an artist, but her work was slow going, until she got involved with Bluebell. “When they discovered that I was an artist, they asked me to make a backdrop to be projected behind a video they had commissioned from the musician Séan Miller for a song based on stories in the area.”
This work led to Soffe volunteering one day a week at The Bungalow, something that has “enriched and transformed my life, rekindled my artwork and opened up a whole new world of people and possibilities”, she says.
Her focus is now the grasslands beside The Bungalow and around the historic filter beds. The watery pools are barely visible now as they are filled in with leafy alder trees and purple-flowering buddleia. As she brings me out to see them, she stops to point out tiny hoverflies, dragonflies and butterflies. A camera in hand, she is documenting the wildlife, flora and fauna of these three hectares, creating a physical record of this eco-paradise of biodiversity as she sees it, before it is developed by the Land Development Agency into 383 units of housing.
There is no date set for this regeneration project to begin, but Bluebell CDP has been promised a new location for their wellness sanctuary within the development. “It won’t be the same, there’ll be no fire or sense of cosiness,” says Holmes. The fish pond, the vegetable patches and the polytunnel will all be dug up and built on, but their eventual demise is not a deterrent for this team.
In Bluebell, people are deciding to spend their time in this space, creating something beautiful, not motivated by money or legacy, but because it is worth doing for the here and now. “Anything can happen, we just have to keep ploughing ahead and just keep going with our dreams,” says Holmes.
