In Ballymun, locals rally to save Axis café, but the figures look grim

“This is my second home,” says John Jervis, sitting in his usual seat in the café in Ballymun’s Axis – the beloved local arts and community centre.

Every morning, he says, his daughter picks him up after the school run and brings him to the café where he has his breakie.

He has mobility issues, he says, so this is his social outlet for the day.

He has gotten to know the café staff over the years, he says. They look after him, they ask him how he is, they cheer him up, he says.

It’s Wednesday morning, and while a lot of familiar faces are bustling about, things have changed.

The space is open, but, as of last Thursday, the kitchen is closed.

Dozens of regular customers have gathered to speak to Axis management, to understand what has happened, and get a handle on how dire the situation is.

The closure came as a total shock to staff and customers, says Erica Kiernan, who organised the gathering.

Some in the crowd have brought coffees and teas from the nearby Centra with them. Others have brought a loaf of batch bread and are making up sandwiches.

Suddenly, the crowd erupts in a rousing cheer.

It is for Linda Fleming, one of the longtime staff, who had just appeared, having left a meeting with management.

With her came Declan Dunne, the voluntary chair of the Axis board, and Sorcha Keane, the director/CEO.

The financial news is not great, says Dunne. The café has been operating at a significant financial loss for several years, and that can’t continue, he says.

Last year, the Axis experienced an overall loss of around €200,000, Keane said by phone on Thursday. “The café is the lion’s share of that.”

On Monday, a spokesperson for the Axis said by email that the café has been “impacted by rising operational costs, including utilities and insurance, alongside ongoing cost-of-living pressures affecting customer spending”.

A loss of €200,000 would be a significant deterioration of the finances of the charity that runs Axis compared to 2024, the last year for which accounts are available on the Axis website and via the Charities Regulator, which show a loss of €8,463 on income of €2.5 million.

Those accounts show café and bar sales of €130,077, but they don’t show how much it cost to run the café, so it’s not possible to see how much of a surplus or loss it was making at that time.

Frustrations and fears

A frustration voiced by many among the crowd at the café on Wednesday morning was that nobody had heard the amenity had been in trouble until Thursday lunchtime.

“It's a community space, but we weren't told about it as a community,” said Kiernan, addressing Dunne and Keane.

Regulars saw the staff called out from behind the kitchen on Thursday to the office, and then leaving soon after, shutting the café early.

“The staff didn't know it was closing. Like you have your job one day and you go upstairs and it's gone,” Kiernan says. “We were all sitting here when it happened. That shouldn't have happened like that.”

If the place was losing so much money, says Kiernan, management should have told the community before it got to this point.

“If it needed funding, we could have all grouped together and fought for the funding, but if we didn't know about it, how are we meant to do it?” she said.

The Axis has been here 25 years, says Dunne, who rejoined the board in November, having also served on it several years ago.

At that moment, a voice in the crowd adds, “My son got christened here 24 years ago.”

The good news, says Dunne, is that over the last 25 years, Axis has made money, and has had money in the bank.

Much of the centre’s money comes via grants from various arms of the government.

In 2024, the charity that runs Axis reported grants from the Department of Children and Pobal (there’s a creche), the Arts Council (there’s an arts centre), and Dublin City Council, among others – and also trading income from renting out space, and the café and bar.

Its accounts on the Charities Regulator’s website show losses some years, and surpluses others. For example, a surplus in 2023 of €14,153, a loss in 2022 of €41,619, and a surplus in 2021 of €330,734.

But with losses of nearly €200,000 last year, Dunne says, the back-up funds will be gone by the middle of next year. “Unless we do something about it.”

And what needs to be done, he says, is cutting costs drastically, and getting more money in.

“I am committed to doing everything I can to raise more money to get into this place, and we have to do that,” says Dunne. “Look, it's been here 25 years, it’s going to be here another 25 years.”

A great deal of the losses the Axis is experiencing are coming from the café, said Dessie Ellis, a Sinn Féin TD, who was at the café Wednesday, by phone on Thursday.

Cutting costs, to save the whole Axis complex in the long term, seems to point towards cutting the café, he says.

Doors closing all over Ballymun

The old Ballymun Shopping Centre was torn down in 2021.

Businesses have been closing across Ballymun for years, with nothing replacing them, as unit after unit lies idle.

In November 2023, the local SuperValu shut its doors, after 17 years. Last year, the Grían Café closed up, having opened in 2023.

Investors haven’t been willing to build a new shopping centre in Ballymun, as they don’t see enough income in the area to support one, local Social Democrats Councillor Mary Callaghan has said.

Callaghan, and longtime Ballymun for Business chair Robert Murphy – who ran the SuperValu and runs the Centra – have both said that the area needs more housing to bring in more potential customers if shops are going to thrive there.

Opening more businesses with the same population and income levels “is just ludicrous”, Murphy said in 2024.

It is in this difficult business environment that the café at the Axis centre has been trying to keep operating.

Conor Reddy, a People Before Profit councillor, said on Wednesday that while the café has apparently been in financial trouble for several years, the recent council rent increase on its tenants were immediately felt by businesses across the area.

In an area with a significant amount of social housing, many local residents all of a sudden found themselves with that bit less to spend.

One shop owner told him, Reddy says, that their takings dropped over 5 percent in the first week the rent increase came in, and have not come back up.

For many local tenants of Dublin City Council, it took a chunk of their disposable income, says Reddy.

On Wednesday morning, rumours swirled around the Axis that the Sweet Paradise Café on the Ballymun Road was about to close too.

Speaking on Thursday morning, Sweet Paradise owner Kasia Betanska said they aren’t closing, but things are getting tougher and tougher.

They survive on passing trade from a nearby hotel, and the “lovely local families” who eat there.

“I am not a big, huge booming business,” Betanska says, “I really go day by day.”

Betanska says the Axis offers a different experience than her business, as Axis has more space for people to gather and pass a few hours.

It will be a tragic loss for the community, but someone has to intervene with funding somehow, she says. “Because Ballymun has nothing without the Axis.”

Indeed, as one person in Wednesday morning’s crowd shouted: “If you close this, you’re ripping the heart out of Ballymun.”

Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, Firehouse Pizza unexpectedly closed this month and hasn’t reopened. It’s unclear if the closure is permanent.

There is so much development happening in Ballymun, says café regular Lorna Higgins.

“But they’re sucking everything away from us,” she says. “We’ve no shops, and we’ve almost lost here now.”

Staff

A major concern of the crowd gathered on Wednesday was the welfare of the four café staff members, some of whom are working there 20 years.

They are at the centre of everyone’s concerns, said Axis director Sorcha Keane.

“The really important thing about all of this is that the staff are currently undergoing a consultation process,” she said.

This means they are currently still staff of Axis and being paid as normal, she said.

“The café is closed at the moment to allow them to get advice, to allow them to get information, and to allow them to come to those meetings with me in the most fully informed way possible,” she said, “so they can advocate for themselves and their roles and their rights.”

When asked by the crowd why the café wasn’t allowed to stay open during this consultation process, board chair Dunne answered that they couldn’t expect the staff to continue to work through it.

One crowd suggestion was to only open a few days a week, and reduce hours.

Keane replied that these are the kind of ideas that the consultation process is about looking at.

But management couldn’t just decide to take away a huge chunk of the staff’s jobs and hours without discussions.

Ray Yeates, Arts Officer with Dublin City Council, and an Axis board member, said on Thursday by phone that various proposals will come out of the consultation process, both from staff and the community. “And the board are very open to that.”

No decisions have been made on the future of the café, but the reality is that it’s a heavily subsidised venture, he says.

What's been happening over the years, is the “costs are outstripping available funding”.

A big family

The community needs to get organised in a way it hasn’t yet, says Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor.

“If you look at the [council’s] capital funding, there's two percent of it went to the North West area, 28 per cent went to the South East area,” he says.

“So, there's far less money coming into communities here, we have far greater needs, but we need to speak up,” he says, “they're getting that money because they're speaking up and they're organised, and they go for every grant available.”

The people of Ballymun need to get organised as a community, get behind the Axis, and start banging on the doors of the Arts Council, the government and the Dublin City Council arts office, for greater funding, he says.

While the Axis café is a commercial endeavour, says Reddy, it has much broader value to people.

Twelve years ago, Mandy Whelan became homeless with her two children. She was in emergency accommodation, but had to vacate her room during the day.

She came to the Axis every day, where she met the staff – the two Lindas, Ellie and Marcella – who took care of her.

“They gave me a shoulder to cry on,” she says, “they really looked after me.”

“If it wasn’t for here, God knows where I would have been mentally and emotionally,” she says.

Erica Kiernan, who works with people with special needs, says the café is also of huge importance to local community groups, like St Michael’s House, who provide services for people with disabilities.

Their group are familiar and at ease with the staff, and that can take a long time to develop sometimes, she says. “They have built up independence for themselves here.”

The staff are patient and nurturing with them, she says, in ways that regular cafés don’t have the time or physical space to do.

“They can have meltdowns, they can scream. It’s no problem here,” she says.

You can’t put a price on a community service like that, she says.

Says long-time staff member Linda Fleming: “We love them all coming in”.

“We’re all like one big happy family,” she says, “Aren’t we Lorna?” she says, turning to Lorna Higgins.

Higgins agrees.

“Our kids have grown up around these girls,” she says. “My seven-year-old granddaughter was in tears the other day when she found out.”

Says Fleming, “It's just a big family community that we’ve lost here.”