Cork Views: It’s time to teach our children how to paint and fix and repair

I grew up in a household where nothing was ever thrown out. My father was a genius when it came to fixing things.

Washing machines were turned upside down, radios were dismantled with all their assembled parts carefully extracted, to be repositioned correctly when the fault was identified and dealt with. His favourite tool was the soldering iron.

My older brother was always there at his side, watching everything. Soon he was the one to turn washing machines and dishwashers upside down, dismantling irons and lamps, building greenhouses and hanging pictures.

My father was a GP and my brother is now a doctor – both could just as easily have been engineers. Both loved radios. Hours were spent building crystal radio sets and communicating with other enthusiasts across the world long before the mobile phone was invented.

My mother had a Singer sewing machine and was a dab hand at anything - making dresses and curtains, running a hem, repairing zips, and fixing buttons.

I never acquired any of these skills. But I was put to work. Summer holidays were spent stripping rooms of wallpaper, preparing uneven surfaces, painting skirting boards, ceilings and doors, and lining up patterned wallpaper until the breach between rolls was imperceptible.

Later, when I was in secondary school and summer jobs were scarce, I used to rummage through jumble shops for second-hand tables that needed a minimum of carpentry but a lot of love.

I taught myself how to sand them down, treat the woodworm, and apply just enough French polish to allow it to gleam without looking like a brand new job. Another brother who was more skilled at sales than repairs would place an ad in the local newspaper and offer it for sale, while claiming a percentage of the profits.

Children no longer spend time repairing and fixing and painting. Everything is replaceable and jobs around house and garden are given to local tradesmen. But kids miss out on a lot of fun and satisfaction as well as the opportunity to pick up skills that last a lifetime.

In recent years, the Dutch have tried to address some of these lost skills with the emergence of the repair café. Each month, a community centre in the Netherlands transforms into a repair café. There, primary school children learn to fix broken items with the help of volunteers.

These cafés have multiple benefits to children in terms of embodying the essence of the circular economy by extending the life of products through repair rather than disposal. They reduce waste, conserve resources, and promote sustainability. They bring people together across generations.

Experienced volunteers meet curious children, fostering collaboration and passing down valuable skills from one generation to the next. It is an exchange of knowledge and creativity that gives kids self-esteem and life-long skills at the same time as strengthening bonds within communities.

So why are they not available right across towns and cities in Ireland?

In fact, it was 15 years ago when Dutch environmental journalist Martine Postma was spurred to act by all the appliances she saw being thrown away in her neighbourhood in Amsterdam.

Despite being reparable, malfunctioning appliances like coffee machines, electric kettles, irons and other household goods were ending up in landfills. At the same time, manufacturers made more and more cheap items, adding to spiralling carbon dioxide emissions and exacerbating climate change.

In 2009, Postma had had enough. She organised a local event where skilled volunteers would try to fix broken devices that community members brought in, free of charge.

Little did she know the reaction the event would receive.

Not only did people turn up in large numbers, the event allowed people to get to know neighbours from every social and economic background in their community.

Now the repair café movement has spread to more than 40 countries worldwide, with nearly 3,200 of them in operation. The Repair Café Foundation of which Martine Postma is a founding member has helped to mandate for stronger legislation to make repairing more accessible in Europe.

Just last April, the European Union adopted a ‘right to repair’ directive with legislation repeatedly itemising repair cafés in the text.

While this is a first step, the Repair Café Foundation point out that under the current law, a manufacturer can offer to replace a broken item rather than repairing it, in situations where repair is more expensive. This rules out the need for companies to fix a whole range of cheap, low quality products - precisely the ones most likely to break down.

According to the Repair Café’s 2023 Annual Report, the global Repair Café movement saved over £1.4m of broken appliances from going to landfill in 2023 alone. That amounts to £33 million of carbon dioxide emissions prevented from entering the atmosphere at a time of climate emergency.

Despite this success, the founder is much more ambitious, suggesting that instead of 3,200 repair cafés across the globe, there should and could be millions.

“Every community should have a repair café,” Martine Postma said.

Ms Postma is dead right. I confess to throwing out lamps, toasters, kettles and irons over the years, convinced they had reached their sell-by date and were irreparable.

There are a number of repair cafés in Cork including: Cork Repair Café (the Lough), Revibe Repair Café in Shandon, and North Cork Repair Café that operates in Mallow, Kanturk and Fermoy.

Community bike repair shops in Cork include Cork Community Bikes in Blackpool, Sign and Cycle in Ballinlough, Cycle Sense in Skibbereen and The Bike Circus in Clonakilty.

Cork Repair Café meets monthly in The Lough Community Centre. They can help you mend clothes, bikes, and household items, and will do their best to both help and advise, claiming that ‘we learn together to try to solve problems’.

People can sign up to volunteer. You don’t need repair experience, there are lots of ways to help. Donations are also accepted to cover costs like tools, materials and room hire.

But repair cafés are about more than just recycling, repairing and caring for their environment. 

Over the years, it became evident that they brought the community together, and people who wanted to do something for their own neighbourhoods had found a way to give back.

The next step in Ireland is for repair cafés to learn from what is happening across the Netherlands - to teach children as young as primary school age to fix broken items from their houses or within the local community.

Imagine summer camps where 12- and 13-year-olds could sign up to apprentice a local volunteer and spend a couple of weeks learning to do basic repairs like fixing a lamp or a washing machine or a kettle. Learning to repair broken chairs and tables, mend clothes or dolls or teddy bears.

Instead of sitting on couches playing with smartphones, they could be heading out to their local community centre in old jeans and ragged jumpers armed with screw-drivers and spanners and sewing needles.

Think of what that would do for the self-esteem of young kids, as well as the fostering of understanding and resilience across generations in communities.

Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork.