Welcome to Utopia - Co Tipperary

"Utopianism is sort of dissed isn't it? Trying to bring together a community of people who want to live in a way that's healthy and that fits the planet's capacity and allows us to engage with each other... why would people diss that?"

It's a good question. Sustainability campaigner Davie Philip, who recently moved into a new house in Ireland's first "eco village', Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary is the man looking for an answer. In truth, you'd never guess Cloughjordan was home to a burgeoning community of eco-warriors and arty types nursing dreams of building a social and environmental utopia on their 67-acre site.
Like so many rural towns, Cloughjordan didn't quite manage to catch the wave of boom-time growth. Until the early 20th century, it was a wealthy market town. However, as the importance of the local train station dwindled in line with the rise in car ownership, Cloughjordan became a backwater. Nowadays, dotted along a half mile or so of secondary road there are four shops, a post office and half a dozen seriously dilapidated looking pubs. The businesses that are open are outnumbered by those boarded up. On a Thursday afternoon when nearby Nenagh and Roscrea will be bustling, it's eerily quiet – you could wait five minutes before seeing a car or person pass up or down the town.
Directly behind the desolate main street, there's a vast building site where construction of the eco-village is now well underway. When it's completed, there will be 130 homes and 16 live-work units; an eco-hostel and an educational centre for visitors; a community cultural centre and an amphitheatre.
Residents in the own will sign a legally binding charter agreeing to numerous sustainable living provisions. A wood-chip boiler and solar panels will provide heating for the entire village. The development is also hooked up to a wind-powered electricity grid. Houses are built from natural, non-toxic materials – lime and hemp is a popular combination, while the truly hardcore are opting for cob, a mixture of earth and straw. (Apparently, it's perfectly durable.)
Meanwhile, already around 50 families who plan to build houses in the eco village are renting locally. And ten years since the plan was hatched at a Dublin meeting, the first residents moved into their eco-houses last Christmas.
"We were activists involved in road protests [Glen of the Downs] and the G.M. campaign. We decided we really wanted to be for something, not just against things," says Davie of the plan's inception a decade ago. "I've been working in sustainability for 15 years, so I really wanted to walk the talk."
So the environmentalists set up a not-for-profit company, Sustainable Projects Ireland and raised €1 million – mostly through investment from members of the company – to buy a site. At first, a greenfield location was envisaged, but the group soon decided to use the project to regenerate an existing settlement.
Cloughjordan, with its under-used train station and boarded-up shops, was an obvious choice.
"The only time the local people had heard of eco-anything was the eco-warriors in the Glen of the Downs, so they expected us to be dreadlocked, with dogs on strings and chaining ourselves to trees," Davie laughs. "When they saw people in suits and retired people and professionals they thought, "There's something different here'. There are still people on the fringes going, "I don't like outsiders, who are these people?' But generally, we've been welcomed."
I was pretty surprised at the general level of non-crustiness in Cloughjordan. Not a headband in sight! For all it's built of hemp, Davie's house looks much like any other new-build over the last few years – big windows, the ubiquitous hard-wood flooring, a fashionably cavernous "open-plan' kitchen and sitting room. It's warm, bright and comfortable.
Already, the old town of Cloughjordan has seen tangible benefits. Eco-villagers have set up a farmers' market, bike shop and café-cum-bookstore, while the presence of 50 new families has strengthened the town's hand in keeping its tiny train station open.

Community and culture
In the medium-term, there's a major emphasis on making the new community self-reliant – which means consuming local produce. Residents each receive a garden allotment to grow their own vegetables (potatoes, peas and carrots are popular at present). Then there's Cloughjordan Community Farm, which produces milk, eggs and veg and has an orchard. The farm will soon begin grain production for a baker who will set up shop in one of the live-work units.
Local self-reliance is only possible if the community pull together, and this necessitates performing an about-turn from the type of atomised lifestyle that mushroomed in Celtic Tiger Ireland.
"In our society, especially after the last 15 years, we don't know our neighbours. Our social life is experienced through watching EastEnders. Whereas, here, relationships are very strong because we're doing things together," says Davie. "We're planting trees together, we're growing food together, we're working the farm together. That builds social capital. So, as well as providing food security, we're getting to know each other better. We have people we can depend on – shoulders to cry on if we need to, or someone to call on if we need a hand."
Davie is an educator with sustainability organisation Cultivate, and the brains behind the "Global Green' area at Electric Picnic. But the unusually strong social dimension of the eco-village has attracted many new residents (most of them from Dublin) whose first motivation isn't necessarily concern at their carbon footprint.
Cloughjordan has proved particularly attractive to actors, writers and other artists. Barabbas Theatre Company director Raymond Keane, and manager Maria Fleming; actor Patrick Bergin, potter Tom Wollen, novelist Tracey Culleton, and author and academic Peadar Kirby are among the new wave of residents.
The project's sales manager, Dave Flannery, believes Cloughjordan has "huge potential to become an artistic and cultural hub." There are already a cine-club and writers' circle up and running, and construction of a community cultural centre and amphitheatre are planned. Fostering creativity and artistic expression is one of the eco-village's stated aims.

Mainstreaming the "60s
Both Dave and Davie firmly believe that a major energy crisis is just around the corner, which means that developing sustainable local food and energy solutions is an urgent priority.
"In my line of work, I'm very aware that we're about to have serious shocks in society, starting with energy shocks. That means that the food that's trucked in from halfway across the world might not be there or it might not be there as regularly. It is quite frightening," says Davie.
So forget about utopianism then? That sounds almost millenarian.
Dave: "It only sounds millenarian when you approach it like – "the end of the world is nigh.' But contained within these projects there's a lot of positivity – using this as a catalyst for positive change. Community, over the last few years, has declined in Ireland and elsewhere. We're rebuilding community. It's preparation for some of these big shocks but it's also improving the quality of life."
Davie: "What we're trying to do is to mainstream a lot of the ideas from the 1960s and the 1970s that were too "out there': community life, mainstreamed."
Cynics will question the optimism of the eco-village movement – and the cynics have history on their side. The early twentieth-century "garden city' movement in Britain attempted to realise practical utopianism through planned, self-contained, self-supporting communities. The towns that resulted include Milton Keynes and Telford – shit holes, in other words. For that matter, the commune ideal of the 1960s didn't prove to be particularly durable either. With hindsight, the optimism of utopianism can often turn out to have been naiveté.
"Well, the experiment we're all in just now," says Davie, referring to the consumerism, "has turned out to be nothing like utopia. We're all working harder, more stressed out, eating terrible food, unhealthy."
Dave nods in agreement. "That was a free-market utopia that was sold to politicians and to ourselves. Ultimately it has failed."