What Cloughjordan teaches you about shared land
Ireland's only real ecovillage, on the Tipperary/Offaly border. The structure, the money, the timeline, and the fight nobody settled for years.
Read this before you commit to a shared-land project of any size, because Cloughjordan is the most complete evidence there is in Ireland — and most of what it teaches is about failures, not buildings. The honest summary up front: there is no such thing as an "ecovillage" legal structure in Ireland, and the binding constraint is not the structure. It is the land and the planning permission.
The scale check. Cloughjordan sits on 67 acres — roughly 27 hectares — and needed a 130-dwelling master plan to make the economics work. If your plan is a handful of homes on a couple of hectares, this is not a smaller version of your project. It is a different project, and the most useful thing Cloughjordan offers you is the list of things it got wrong.
1. The structure
- The vehicle: Sustainable Projects Ireland Ltd (SPIL), formed in 1999 — a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and a registered educational charity, run along co-operative principles, with around 125 members. (case study, Emerald) (Modelling the Transition)
- Not a co-op and not a CLT. It is a CLG doing co-operative things — which is how almost every community land project in Ireland actually works, because there is no bespoke legal form for either.
- The governance churn: consensus decision-making first, then a Viable Systems Model in 2007 (at one point 21 working groups), then sociocracy from 2020 — and still deep divisions. Members pledge 100 hours of voluntary labour a year. (consensus and governance at Cloughjordan)
- The retrospective view from members themselves: an alternative legal entity "might have been more suitable such as a Community Land Trust or a Limited Liability Partnership — although the latter is not currently available under Irish legislation." (case study, Emerald)
2. The money
- Members' capital: each member invested about €15,000, in two stages.
- The land purchase was funded half by a loan from Clann Credo (social finance) and half by a loan stock scheme — members and supporters lending at below-bank rates.
- The infrastructure was funded by a commercial bank loan plus a second loan stock scheme. (Modelling the Transition)
Where the money came from is the lesson. Social finance plus members' own loan stock, not a bank — and not a grant. If your plan has one line that says "bank loan" and nothing that says "members' capital", it is not Cloughjordan-shaped and it probably will not close.
3. The timeline: ten years, and 36 conditions
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1999 | The company (SPIL) is formed. |
| 2004/2005 | 67 acres purchased, after negotiating a one-year option to purchase while testing whether planning permission was even obtainable. |
| Planning | Outline permission for housing and full permission for infrastructure, carrying 36 conditions. Complying with them took about 15 months. |
| December 2009 | First residents move in — ten years after the company was formed. |
| 2015 | Common-land ownership finally agreed, years after people had moved in (see section 4). |
(Modelling the Transition) (case study, Emerald)
Check this figure. One summary of this material describes the founding-to-first- residents period as six years; the detailed timeline — company formed 1999, first residents December 2009 — is ten. Treat it as about a decade and verify the dates in the sources above before you quote them.
The move that saved it was the option. Buying an option to purchase, then testing planning feasibility during that year, is the single most transferable tactic here. The groups that buy first and apply later are the ones that run out of money.
4. The unresolved common-land fight
Ownership of the common land was left unresolved for years. It took until 2015 to agree what common areas stayed with the developer and what transferred to the owners' management company (OMC) — and the eventual consensus "left many on both sides unhappy". The Multi-Unit Developments Act 2011, which created the OMC structure, was itself a live dispute inside the community. (Mint magazine, "Commons sense")
Settle who owns the shared ground before anyone builds on it. This is the single most reliable cause of long, corrosive disputes in shared-land projects. Every project believes it will be different. It is not different. Write the answer down, get it signed, and do it before the first foundation is poured.
5. What runs there now
Inside the ecovillage, Cloughjordan Community Farm is a member-owned CSA, operating since 2008 — a separate enterprise from the ecovillage company, and a useful reality check on scale: 70–90 adult members, roughly 6–8 acres (about 3 hectares) in production, supplying around 90 families, at €69.33 per month per adult with children free and twice-weekly collection. (Cloughjordan Community Farm) (ARC2020, letter from the farm)
Note what that means: ninety families is supplied from about three hectares — but the members live next door. Cloughjordan is a captive audience for its own farm. If your members are scattered across a county, your numbers will be much harder to reach.
6. The five transferable lessons
- Buy land after planning confidence, not before. The option-to-purchase year is the cheapest insurance in the whole project.
- One entity, decided early. Changing vehicle mid-build is what breaks projects — Cloughjordan's own members said a different structure might have suited them better.
- Settle who owns the common land before anyone builds. Fifteen years of argument, over ground that everyone assumed was already sorted.
- The money is social finance plus member loan stock, not a bank. Members' capital is the equity; the bank is the gap-filler.
- The hard part is never the buildings. It is the people. Twenty-one working groups, four governance systems, and still deep divisions.
(Modelling the Transition) (Mint magazine)
7. Two smaller Irish examples
Cloughjordan is not the only shape, and neither example needed 67 acres.
- Common Ground (Wicklow, founded 2018) — 25 homes plus shared facilities, structured as a co-operative plus a community land trust. (Housing Agency, community-led housing)
- Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance CLG — a not-for-profit CLG, registered charity and Approved Housing Body, operating as a co-operative housing organisation governed by a voluntary board. Its stated obstacle to scaling, in its own words, is blunt: "Land, Land and Land." (Oireachtas committee submission)
On community land trusts. CLTs are named in Irish law — the Affordable Housing Act 2021 allows a housing authority to enter arrangements with "a community-led housing organisation, a housing co-operative or a community land trust". (Housing Agency) But because the Act is about housing delivery, the practical route is to partner with a local authority or an approved housing body, not to go it alone. There is still no bespoke Irish CLT legal form — in practice a CLT is a CLG or a co-op doing CLT-style things.
8. What to take from it
- Decide which project you are actually doing. Giving a few friends a stake in land is a conveyancing decision you can take in weeks. Starting an ecovillage is a multi-year planning and financing project. Only the second one needs an entity.
- If yours is the small version — a cluster of two or three dwellings with shared growing space — you need a solicitor, not a company. A long site lease or a co-ownership agreement is the document that does the work.
- Buy nothing and promise nothing until the site has been assessed. Every house needs planning permission, a wastewater solution that passes site suitability, a water supply and safe access. A site that cannot percolate cannot be built on, whatever the ownership says.
Not legal, tax or planning advice. The facts here are drawn from the published sources linked beside them, and the financial and planning figures are as reported at the time of writing. Take any project of your own to a solicitor and an accountant — and to your local authority's planning department — before you commit money.
Free to copy, adapt and pass on.