nofunchee
Well-Known Member
i'd see it as a place for whoever's bothered. it was started and has been maintained by people who you could probably describe as activists. as a result the activist buzz has been a huge part of it. fair enough, and it's hard to pretend it's underpinnings are any different. but it hasn't been just for activists either.
there has been other shit going on that has involved 'non-political' people. not from the locale necessarily but from different parts of dublin and beyond. there was also plans in the pipeline for involving local youth in mary's abbey. well not quite - i had a ideas that i reckon would have been pretty successful had we not been shut down. but i guess that's easy to say now.
i remember taking a break from cleaning one day out the front of mary's abbey and a young lad from the local area was passing. he saw that we were open and said to his brother real enthusiastically "it's open! that place is deadly, you can play pool for free!"
not the biggest deal in the world or anything but we were obviously beginning to have some sort of presence in the area. to be honest just providing a space is enough for some people to put on activities which bring people in and involved. one of the things we were talking about before we got shut down was finding meaningful and non-scary ways of getting people to share their opinions and criticisms with us.
i haven't been involved in putting this gathering together but i think it's mainly to do with the fact that a fair few people have been setting up or trying to set up similar spaces all around ireland recently. i think this is a pretty useful way of these people coming together and trashing out a few ideas and learning from eachothers experiences.
the process of setting up a social centre from scratch and working out all the problems and red tape with little or no experience is the first battle. i think that involving people who would not generally tend to gravitate towards such a project (for whatever reason) has to be the second step.
