Transition towns produce growth in recession-hit Ireland

From boom to bust, growth to stagnation, from full employment to high rates of joblessness, Ireland has gone through many painful transitions since the recession hit the country three years ago. Amidst the gloom, a more welcome transition from dependency to local sustainability is providing hope and employment in the small town of Kinsale, the world's first transition town, 25 kilometres from Cork in the south-west of the country.
"It's about creating community resilience," says Liz Creed, a volunteer with Transition Town Kinsale. Kinsale is one of Ireland's seven transition towns, part of a movement of 394 towns and villages world-wide that aims at promoting local sustainability and reduce CO2 emissions.
"If a euro is spent in the local community on goods produced locally, 50 or 60 cent goes back into the local community. If a euro is spent on imported goods in a big supermarket chain, only 10 cent goes back to the local community," says Creed, who helped develop the Transition Town Kinsale 50-mile meal award. The award, presented since 2007 at the annual Kinsale Gourmet Festival, is awarded to meals made with ingredients produced exclusively within a 50 mile radius of the town.
A 50-mile meal scheme is due to be launched in local shops and restaurants before Christmas in the picturesque coastal town. Shops selling goods produced within 50 miles of the town will be able to display a sticker in their windows and restaurants can display the 50-mile logo on their menus. "We are known as a town with good restaurants, but we also want to be known as producers of good food," adds Creed.
Two producers growing vegetables within one mile of Kinsale, are Transition Town members Aimi Pinder and Rebecca Stevenson, who launched Kinsale Green Growers, an organic vegetable business, two years ago. "We started up a community vegetable box scheme, two years ago, which has created employment for us two organic growers," says Aimi Pinder, who also hopes to take on an apprentice in the future.
"In order to survive what is a tough, very physical business with very long hours, it has been very helpful to be able to market directly to the community," she says. "We could spend four months of the year growing vegetables, but come June if there was nobody to sell our vegetables to, we couldn't survive," she adds. "Part of growing vegetables sustainable is finding the right market. Because of transition town, many people were primed to buy from us. But there were also people who came at it from the other end. They subscribed to the organic vegetable box and learned more about transition town and local sustainability," says Pinder.
Stevenson and Pinder, who will be supplying 40 households with vegetables this season, emphasise that they model their efforts on the community supported agriculture model. "This makes for a fair exchange between the buyer getting good, high-quality food and the producer having an income at the times of year when food is not in production," says Pinder.
Kinsale also runs a community supported agriculture scheme, whereby members pay the farmer up front for a share in a potatoes or oats crop. Another practical TTK initiative aimed at creating employment locally is the bio-digester scheme. There are plans for an anaerobic digester, to which local farmers and restaurants bring manure and food waste which would then be converted into high value fertiliser that goes back onto the farmers' land and biogas that can be used for electricity generation or domestic heating "Any farmer could build an anaerobic digester on his land," says Creed, "but the point would be that this would be community owned for the benefit of the community."