Help us build Teacht Aniar, a cultural revival centre for a resiliant future.

We are Siobhan and Diarmuid, founders of Wild Irish, an enterprise for the reclamation and evolution of our native language and heritage. We have been given an extraordinary opportunity to buy a property in South Kilkenny before it goes on the market. To avail of this offer, we need to raise €125,000. Join us, share the story, reach out to your community, and have a look at the offerings we have collected to play your part in sharing what was always unique and valuable about this small island.

Faoin Ait - About the Place

With your help we will build a Cultural Centre called Teacht Aniar (Resilience, coming from west)

Currently there is a renovated farmhouse with outhouses in good condition on 1.5 acres in total.

In the long shed we will share food and ideas. We will make accommodation for up to twelve people in the stables for retreats that will serve as individual rooms when there are no retreats. There is a courtyard and space for parking. A barn for events and workshops with a utility shed for storage and a polytunnel for feeding ourselves and our guests. East of the buildings lies the meadow that will be preserved for the children to run free.

And lastly, but significantly, there is a river: An Abhainn Dubh, a tributary of the Suir, which has good water quality. It is banked by a wild gorsey glen, which longs to be explored.

We have already begun holding retreats at Teacht Aniar and though rudimentary, all the facilities are exist to host groups.

Local community

There is good relations with neighbours and the local community for a development of this nature and South Kilkenny has an enthusiastic Irish language community. The áit is fequadistant from our native parishes in Waterford and Wexford.

Teacht Aniar translates literally into returning from the West and describes too our journey (heroic or not) from the remote Western Gaeltacht of Corca Dhuibhne back to our native ceantar (region). Having rediscovered and refined our Gaeilge, we have carried it home; like an ember in the pocket. Ag lorg an an tinteáin chun tine a lasadh. Seeking the hearth to set it in.

The Finance

We are raising half of the money €125,000 ourselves , and half through crowdfunding - €125,000, to make the initial purchase of the full site.

As this purchase for a dual purpose of a family home and a social enterprise, we will separate the áit into two separate folios. One for the house, which will remain in our name and the rest being transferred to our non-profit Wild Irish CLG. We will be the caretakers of the áit and our family will host those who come, in a traditional village sense of the word.

As a CLG Wild Irish will then be eligible for both capital and current funding from the Department of Culture and Gaeltacht for the establishment of Irish language centres outside of the Gaeltacht. This centre would be the first of its kind in all of Ireland.

The structure of the CLG will be a board of directors and a community of interested members. We will draw this membership from our peers, locals and mentors within the ecological movement in Ireland.

Improvements to site will happen in two ways. Through funded works and Meitheal Days, where we will host retreats with traditional who craftspeople will share their skills; such as tanning, stone wall building, cobbing, thatching even

It takes a village

In the aspiration to cultural revival, the inclusion of the children is primary. And though our courses are designed mostly for adults, children are always welcome at Teacht Aniar, because as parents we have learned that returning to a sustainable way of living is only authentic if it makes provision for children. Modelled on a real village, our three children, our home and family will form the strong beating heart of Teacht Aniar.

Custodianship

We undertake to develop this extraordinary place with the utmost respect for the land, in full consultation with the local community and in harmony with permaculture principles. We undertake to become worthy custodians of this land by protecting the biodiversity, preserving the river, improving the soil and growing vegetables and planting tree. Those that donate to the project can do so in exchange for a place on a weekend retreat in the future.

A final word on community building:

In this crowdfunding campaign, we are building community. In gathering and offering rewards for our existing tribe of supporters, we are creating opportunities for future supporters to fortify their connection with the community motivated to preserve our historical gifts as a means of future proofing.

The program of events that will be held here in the coming years should provide us with an opportunity to meet all our supporters in person and return their generosity.

If the value of this work and dream is evident to you. If you would like to join this community of would be Gaels that is shunning a corporate paradigm.  If you would like to support us but don’t have any money, do get in touch with other offerings of help. Adh Mór daoibh.

Ar Scéal (our story)

We began Wild Irish Retreat as an Irish language and cultural revival weekend eight years ago in the Gaeltacht of Corca Dhuibhne (Dingle) peninsula in West Kerry, Ireland. We learned a lot on our first wild and (edgy) retreat on the tail end of Hurricane Ophelia, making a sweatlodge at high tide in a rocky cove.

Six months later Uisne, our first son, was born.

The retreats got wilder as we brought them to Cearbhuil's off grid land in the Burren. Tents replaced dormitories. Fires replaced cookers. We rebelled against the lockdown and had one retreat where everyone cried at being close to other humans again. Eirú was born.

We split our efforts then, responding to the requests, and the difficulty of both being absent from two small children. Siobhán held women's creative retreats le Gaeilge, craft and ritual, collaborating with Cearbhuil Ní Fhionnghusa and Mishel from Tang. Diarmuid did sweatlodges and hurling for men's retreats and joined yoga teacher Michael Ryan to found Nature of Man.

Then two years ago, we left Corca Dhuibhne in search of community, a home and a 'road schooling' adventure. We traveled around Ireland house-sitting, camping and bringing Wild Irish to festivals with poetry, rituals and wild hurling. And every time we had to leave a place, another would appear on the horizon. Like this we learned to live in trust and not give into the anxiety of being without a stable home.

Then we conceived a third child, and the appetite for travel evaporated and was replaced by a longing for stability and a nest. Life brought us to a halfway point in Killkenny near the small Steiner school here.

For eight months we lived in temporary places and our son was born in a one-bedroom cabin. For the first three months of his life, we lived in a happy heap but again we had to move on.

Then a friend told us of a farmhouse in her family, which we could stay in until it was sold. From the day we moved into 'Fr Tom's old place' in Chruabhaile, we saw the potential to realize our vision for an Irish language retreat centre and home, all in one place. It's a homecoming, exactly halfway between our native birthplaces in Waterford and Wexford and Teacht Aniar (Coming from the West) captures our journey from the West Kerry Gaeltacht from which we brought the precious embers of Irish home to lay in our hearth here.