Church sells off The Secret Garden
There has been a Community Training Workshop in the grounds of All
Hallows College in Dublin's Drumcondra for the past fifteen years.
These workshops provide complimentary education and training to early
school - leavers and other educationally and socially disadvantaged
people. The Drumcondra workshop takes most of its trainees from the
prisons and the probation service. They provide training in organic
horticulture, the only facility outside of third level education in
the country which provides this training. It is a small workshop with
just fourteen training places. As such it is the smallest and most
specialised workshop in the country.
The workshop setting is in a beautifully cultivated garden with
greenhouses, a pond and a pottery. There is also a vegetable patch
and an orchard. Trainees who have a range of difficulties and
disadvantages in their lives come to this workshop and are allowed to
learn and develop at their own pace in a gentle, open air
environmentally friendly space close to the city, and close to the
prisons and hostels many of them live in.
However, to the disbelief of the two full-time staff who work
here, all this is to end without a single thought or word of
consultation with them. Their landlord is the Catholic Church, in the
form of All Hallows College which trains priests for the missions! It
has sold the land the workshop is on to a private housing developer
for a sum somewhere between four and seven million pounds (it depends
on who you believe).
The only consultation was a letter the the workshops' management
committee informing that the land had been sold. Six weeks later,
no-one from All Hallows has bothered to visit the workshop to see
what their options are or to try to accommodate their needs.
Architects from the developer have already moved in taking photos and
doing measurements.
The staff discovered that, when selling, All Hallows described the
property as derelict land! This situation raises in a stark way all
the issues about church control of property, about the obscene values
of capitalism and about the powerlessness of people who work with
disadvantaged groups, and about the disadvantaged themselves.
Despite the fact that the workshop has been funded by FAS, and to
a much lesser extent the probation service, for the past fifteen
years and despite the fact that over three hundred trainees have
benefited from the unique training offered by the workshop, when the
chips are down all of these state agencies simply wash their hands of
the problem and walk away.
There are two full-time and two part-time jobs, fourteen training
places and a unique organic garden and green space close to the city
at stake here. The workshop also trains environmental groups in
permaculture. A campaign has been started to save the workshop and to
retain the walled garden. On invest- igation, it turned out that the
workshop does not even have a lease on the land, only a licence
(which gives no legal rights). Would the education of third level
graduates have been left on such an insecure footing for fifteen
years by the state bodies responsible?
You can support the Save the Horticulture Workshop Campaign by
contacting Mary Millett at 01-8360578 for information about events
and activities.
Patricia McCarthy
