National - Event Notice
Thursday January 01 1970

Seomra Spraoi presents Scoil Spraoi - Social Centre gathering Friday 11 and Saturday 12 April

national | miscellaneous | event notice

Tuesday March 25, 2008 13:34

by Hilary - Seomra Spraoi

Scoil Spraoi is the Seomra Spraoi educational working group. This is our first event. We hope you like it…

Social Centre Gathering

A space to share our experiences and knowledge about Social Centres. By sharing these things and making them collective we can sharpen our tools, develop our ideas; create new forms of non-hierarchical and anti-capitalist organisation. Through collective discussion debate & action we create communities of resistance.

Social Centres

Social Centres have been an important and stable development of social movements. Social Centres create space for meetings, workshops, benefit gigs, not for profit cafes, libraries, internet access, craft activities, bicycle workshops, self-defence training: the list goes on. What more can we use them to do? What forms of collective activity do they make possible? What forms of resistance emerge form such a social space? What are their limitations?

We have part of the answers to these questions in our collective experiences. This is a chance to share, discuss and debate those experiences.

Seomra Spraoi

The Seomra Sproai collective was started three years ago with the intention of setting up an autonomous social centre in Dublin. We reckon we’ve been pretty successful…

Since our humble beginnings we have occupied three different spaces of our own, each bigger than the previous one. Our move to 4 Mary’s Abbey in July 2007 saw a huge surge in activity and an expansion of the collective. Over 20 groups held regular meetings or events there, with hundreds of people using the space on a weekly basis. After a month of bureaucratic dealings with the landlord, fire authority & police the collective decided to terminate the lease. From this experience we learned a lot...

We keep on learning. The collective is highly organised, with around 30 people managing the social centre, via working groups, and an open meeting of the collective every Thursday.

Europe wide days of action

This gathering coincides with a European wide call for "decentralized days of action for squats and autonomous spaces" - a weekend of discussion & action in defence of free spaces.
See http://april2008.squat.net:8080/

We want to make autonomous spaces and social centres more visible as a political movement. We want to develop interconnections and solidarity between social centres and autonomous spaces. We want to keep linking our spaces with new people and new struggles, and support the creation of autonomous spaces in places where there has not been a history of this kind of action.

Timetable to follow with details of discussion / workshop titles and times.

If you need somewhere to crash over the weekend please email us - seomraspraoi@gmail.com - and we'll try to sort you out. There is limited space so we can't guarantee space but we'll do our best to sort you out.

We will have food available on Friday and Saturday - please email us if you have special dietary needs we should know about.