A Tipperary town marks the opening of the Circular Square Hub and climate conscious space

On Saturday 18th of October, the Circular Square, a community hub for the Circular Economy was officially opened at its new premise at 79/80 Upper Irishtown, Clonmel by Councillor Pat English, the Mayor and Michael Murphy, TD, who helped to cut the ribbon to this momentous event.

The place was abuzz with well-wishers and friends excited about the prospect of this new climate conscious and creative social space. Michael Fitzgibbon welcome everyone and gave a quick history of the Repair Café since its modest beginning as an offshoot of Suircan Environmental Forum and its current ambition to become a showcase of best practice in community climate action.

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The Circular Square is comprised of three main rooms: a repair workshop to store and do repairs to items brought by the general public to the monthly Repair Café (last Saturday of the month – 11.30-1.30): instead of throwing away broken objects, you can bring them for the Repair team to look at and they will do their best to fix them for you. By doing this, you can save money, space and help the environment. Mike Fitzgibbons leads this section and hosts a monthly Repair Club for handy people with a mind for fixing things every second Thursday of the month (5.30pm -7.30 pm). More details on the Suircan website and Clonmel Repair Café social medias.

The second room is the hugely popular Toy Library from which you can borrow toys for up to a month. Louise Lalor, a local primary school teacher, is the founder of this two year old endeavour that has nearly 100 signed up families. She has many toys and games to suit different age groups, so come along and borrow toys Instead of buying them and save space and clutter, and reduce waste as many of these toys end up in landfills. Louise was recently runner up in the Circular Living

Advocate category in the Full Circle Awards, for her work in promoting circular living in our daily lives.
The third room is the Sewing Room, lead by textile artist Theresia Guschlbauer who started the monthly Sew Social with a few other volunteer seamstresses.

If you want to improve your sewing skills and have the craic and chat with new friends, this informal circle ( every third Wednesday of the month: 7pm – 9pm ) will get you going on the sewing machine, pick up and practice basic new skills and then guide you through your sewing projects.

The Circular Square team also promote clothes swapping and to this end we hold regular Clothes Swaps where many items change hands, thus postponing the time for them to end up in landfills or incinerated. For the keen swappers and bargain hunter, the Circular Square are organising a Rewear Fair at the Talbot Hotel on Sunday 9th November from 12 to 4pm.

Tickets are € 5 at the door or you can choose to take part and hire a rail or table to sell your clothes or promote your Rewear-related business by registering at circularsquareclonmel @gmail.com

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You can hire one of these rooms for meetings, to host a workshop or for a social occasion depending of what your needs are. With this in mind, we will be hosting a family-friendly drop-in ‘Cooking for Gaza’ event in aid of Concern’s aid effort during the Halloween school break on Tuesday 28th October from 2.30 to 4.30pm: there will be pumpkin carving and soup, seasonal foods, Halloween-themed crafts, facepainting and costume swapping for children.

The Circular Square is to date exclusively run by an enthusiastic group of volunteers who are embracing and promoting circular living with practical ways of Reducing, Reusing, Fixing, Swapping, Loaning before Recycling. Its mission is to share this mindset with our community and show people how to do this in a fun and simple way.

All our activities are free but we encourage people to be generous and leave a donation which goes toward the rent and running costs of the premise. We welcome everyone to visit and see what we do and if you think you have a skill that might be useful, come and talk to us to teach others or to help us as a volunteer.

Thanks to a grant by the Leader/ South Tipperary Development Company, we will be offering training in the new year to our team and to others who wish to improve their repair skills in bicycle maintenance, electrics and sewing machine servicing and textile upcycling.

So to keep up to date with all our activities by signing up to our newsletter on the Suircanenvironmental.ie website, by following us on social media at Clonmel Repair café or by emailing us at circularsquareclonmel @gmail.com