Pick up a coffee and fix your stuff in repair cafes around Ireland
HAVE you ever darned a shirt? Fixed a plug? Repaired a stereo? Now you can and have a cup of tea, too. Pop-up repair cafés are growing in popularity with events held in Co Kerry, Co Wicklow, Westmeath and Co Dublin. The cafés help people with those minor, but potentially costly, repair problems that beset us all.
I grew up on a farm, so I like to think I’m handy when it comes to certain tasks; and yet, at others I’m as useless as the next person.
For example, when the washing machine packed up a few years ago, I had to utilise a combination of YouTube and Google to figure out what was wrong, and then fix it — very slowly. On successfully completing the job (the trouble was a 50c coin, if I recall correctly), I was so infused with hunter-gatherer notions that I almost donned a loin cloth and animal hide for the weekend trip to Tesco.
The second time the same washing machine packed in, I struggled in vain to find the problem. Eventually, the landlord bought a new one.
Having a multi-disciplinary repair ‘school’ nearby, where you could also drink your weight in tea and coffee, sounds like a solution for our age, when the skills our parents took for granted are beyond us as we spend hours commuting to and from work and live face-first in our phones and computers.
The Repair Café was first conceived in Amsterdam, in 2009, by journalist Martine Postma and sustainability consultant, Peter van Vliet. Tapping into a need identified by the patrons, the Repair Cafe Netherlands Foundation was established in March, 2010, and organised ten repair cafe gatherings in its first year, operating under key rules: to bring back repairing in a modern way; to maintain repair expertise and to spread this knowledge; to promote social cohesion in the local community, by connecting neighbours from different backgrounds with each other in a low-key event.
A repair cafe at St. Kieran’s Community Centre, in Athlone, included a seamstress and people skilled in electrical, electronic, bicycle and tv/radio repair and in woodwork. Participants could learn how to sew up a hem on a garment, fix a puncture on a bicycle wheel, change a fuse in a plug, wire a plug, and fix the leg of a stool, a stereo, remote controls, hairdryers, toasters, and even laptops.
According to Ruth Maxwell, of Westmeath County Council: “The repairers aren’t necessarily a person who has qualified in a particular area, but can be someone who is just very good at fixing something and can pass this knowledge to another. Western society revolves around consumption — we rarely consider repairing a stool or mending a jumper, but there are many people who have valuable practical knowledge that could be passed on and that is what the repair cafe is all about.”
Shay Hamilton, of Athlone Tidy Towns and another organiser of the one-day repair cafe, says there are proposals to have three more sessions in Athlone this year. He says grabbing instruction from the internet will never replace the interactivity of two people hunched over the same piece of banjaxed equipment. “You’re not going back to YouTube and saying ‘did I do it right?’ Your confidence levels will go up, you can bounce ideas off one another.
“You have to think about the skill-set that it presents. For our parents, money was a lot tighter, so there were more MacGyver types around.
“A lot of this stuff may have been passed on through the generations, but if our generation doesn’t pass it on…”
Robin Grindrod, a software engineer who has always been keen on computer repairs, was one of the instructors in Athlone. “It was brilliant,” he says. People can be too busy to take on an unfamiliar task, but often it is because they do not take the time to try, he says.
Shay says people purchase items, particularly electronic products,with an expectation that they will not last. In his opinion, schools should also be focused on “teaching people basic skills for life”.
Ruth says the person learning how to repair a broken item benefits from the experience, and it is cost-effective in more ways than one. “The repair cafés extend the life of many items that would otherwise be just thrown out and sent to landfill,” she says.
It sounds like a win-win situation. Now, where did I leave my screwdriver?
- Repair cafe, Sandymount, Dublin: Saturday, March 7, 2pm-5 pm, at ChristChurch Hall, Sandymount Green
Repair cafe, Buncrana, Co Donegal, Saturday, March 21, 2pm to 5pm, at the Exchange. In addition to repairing, there will also be give-and-take stalls for clothes, toys and bric a brac.
Events are also planned for Skerries, Clondalkin, Ashbourne, Bray, Clontarf, Wicklow, Dingle, Killarney and Nenagh. www.repaircafe.ie.
READ NEXT: The Burlesque Chef says ditch the guilt and fall in love with food again
