Growing Women’s Sheds in Swords and Balbriggan are looking for permanent homes

On Monday, Swords Women’s Shed was preparing for their second year of marching in two St Patrick’s Day parades, said co-founder Glenda McDonnell. 

“It was brilliant,” McDonnell said of last year. “We were all in costumes like butterflies and flowers and all.”

Balbriggan Women’s Shed co-founder, Fidelma Geraghty, also answered the phone while with the ladies, preparing for the Balbriggan’s parade.

“You can hear in the background all the women laughing,” said Geraghty. 

“We're building a float,” Geraghty said. It’s a life-sized model of a shed, and a leprechaun puppet, she said.

While Balbriggan’s started just a year ago, the Swords Women’s Shed is larger and more developed, going on five years old now.

They are social spaces, self-funded, run by volunteers, meant for fun, their co-founders say. 

“We've a movie club, we've a book club, we have an exercise club, a walking club, and we're newly bringing in a sewing club,” McDonnell says. “I could list the things for the next hour.”

Both groups say they are growing quickly – and both are still looking for permanent homes. At the moment, neither has one. 

The Swords group gets two days a week in the Men’s Shed, runs yoga at the library, a book club at St Colmcilles GAA club. “It’s all over the place,” McDonnell said. 

At a recent council committee meeting, a councillor brought a motion asking for the council to prioritise securing Swords Women’s Shed a permanent location. The response? It does not currently have a site available.

The need

Right now, Swords Women’s Shed meets at the Men’s Shed, which has its own building. 

The women get access to it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In return, the Women’s Shed gives them a donation. 

They make use of other facilities too, whoever will let them. “Whereas, if we had a building, we could keep it all in one space.”

Not only that, the Women’s Shed is outgrowing the size of the borrowed spaces they are using now. 

“We feel now like the Men's Shed is nearly getting too small for us,” McDonnell said. “Our waiting lists are getting higher and higher and higher."

Each week, registration opens for events at 7pm on Fridays, she said, and “it’s the first 35 people, basically, who get in”.

She said the enthusiasm from women across the community communicates a huge need. 

“A lot of the women have said, since the shed started, they don't know what they would do – only for the shed,” McDonnell said. 

“Because it has given them a completely different outlook on life,” she said. “It's taken their isolation away for a start, you know.”

And they can’t include everyone who wants to be active in it.

“It’s frustrating, very frustrating, McDonnell said.

In Balbriggan, the Women’s Shed is dealing with a similar situation, said Geraghty.

They recently secured access to a space in a football clubhouse, but only at certain hours. “We’re paying rent,” she said.

At the moment, they do some woodworking, but since they don’t have a permanent base, they do it in people’s homes. 

At the council meeting

At the Balbriggan/Rush-Lusk/Swords Area Committee meeting on 12 March, Sinn Féin Councillor John Smyth brought a motion asking for the council to help the Swords Women’s Shed get a permanent location.

“I probably don't need to tell many of the councillors here how much of a formidable group of women the Swords Women's Shed are,” Smyth said. 

“On a personal level, they have helped a member of my extended family through a very difficult period of cancer diagnosis,” he said. “I don't think she would be as well as she is today and fighting as much as she is today if it wasn't for their support.”

The scale of demand is huge, said Mayor Tom O’Leary, a Fine Gael councillor.

“I’m familiar with the Men's Sheds and what they do, but their numbers don't compare to this group,” O’Leary said. “I mean, this is the equivalent of three, four Men’s Sheds groups, and we need to rise to the challenge and look after them.”

But the council does not currently have a site available for the Women’s Shed in Swords, said a written response from senior executive officer Aoife Sheridan.

There’s lots of new housing being built in Fingal, and that brings with it lots of demand “for increased community support and community facilities”, Sheridan wrote.

The council is focusing on the delivery of projects identified in its capital programme – its multi-annual budget for big once-off projects – “which address urgent need in areas yet to receive access to supports” and “on remedial work in existing facilities”, she wrote.  

“The Council does not have any properties/sites currently available in the Swords area which would serve as a permanent location for Swords Women’s Shed,” she wrote.

However, the council is always on the lookout for opportunities, Sheridan said at the meeting on Friday.

Fianna Fáil Councillor Darragh Butler pointed to the example of the Men’s Shed in Swords, which is in a space delivered in 2017 with support from a developer, as a model that could be repeated.

Said O’Leary, the mayor: “There's all sorts of development planned here. We need to find a piece of ground for this group.”

The ask

For McDonnell and Geraghty, the ask is simple.

“All we need is one room and a toilet,” McDonnell said.

 Although, a few other things would be nice too, she said.

“A working kitchen and a big craft table,” and a space that’s consistently open. “Somewhere women can come in any time.”

Without it, McDonnell said, the group will continue to grow — and the pressure will increase.

“The bigger we get, the more frustrating it’ll be,” she said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.