Ireland Eco Village

Happy St Patrick’s Day!  It was a bit of a struggle of what to write about on St Patrick’s Day.  So I started doing some digging around and found this wonderful project called the Cloughjordan Eco Village.  Constuction on the village began on Earth Day 2007 on the 67 acre farm the group purchased.  Here’s the village map. 

The Village aims could generally come under the following headings [via TheVillage.ie]:

• Human Scale:-
  A place that can down-size the institutions that provide housing, food, waste disposal, transportation, health care, education, social interaction and democracy, and contain these systems in a community where direct human involvement in the institutions is promoted.
• A fully featured settlement:-
  The Village will provide as many of the services and products required by the residents itself. To this end a critical mass of about 132 households plus the existing population of Cloughjordan can allow for a fully featured settlement.
• Human activities that are harmlessly integrated into the natural world : -
  The Village will be designed around a permaculture concept that looks to nature for the models and structures of a living system
• A place supportive to healthy human development:-
  This is a balanced and integrated development to all facets of human life, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual
• A community that can be successfully continued into the indefinite future: -
  This is the cornerstone of sustainable development. If what we do today can be seen to have adverse effects down the line then we must cease. The Village must be viable for the next generation, so therefore it must offer to that generation a place that they can also sustain.

You know that my posts aren’t complete without a video, so here ya go:

Source: Cloughjordan Eco Village