Evolution of Pucheen

Pucheen has evolved from the Ballinamore Permaculture Group which started to show documentaries on a Tuesday night in McGirl's Bar, Ballinamore in early 2005. A diverse range of documentaries have been shown on all aspects of low-impact, sustainable living in the meantime.

One of the first film's we showed was Alcohol Can Be A Gas which describes how alcohol can be used as a fuel and how in fact, it was the original fuel used in combustion engines. The documentary covers much more in it's 150 minutes including permaculture techniques, growing crops for alcohol production, brewing and distilling alcohol, how to adjust your engine to run efficiently on alcohol and much more. Poteen (poitín as Gaeilge) started to become a theme...

Later on that year, The Northwest Green Festival approached us to organise a Sustainable Cinema event for the festival in Autumn 2005. As part of our event (again held in McGirl's Bar) we modified a Nissan Bluebird to run on poteen. Actually, we used surgical spirits, an expensive alternative as it proved difficult to find poteen that was not diluted with water. We successfully demonstrated the principle however, that a petrol car can be easily modified to run on (pure) poteen.

Earlier on this year our Permaculture group became active in campaigning against proposed GM potato trials by BASF in County Meath, just down the road. Fortunately, we were not alone and many other groups put pressure on the EPA, resulting in the trials being suspended for a year (and perhaps more). GM potato trials have a particular resonance with the Irish of course, whose ancestors died in their millions from a potato famine. There was plenty of food in the country but it had to be used by Irish tenants to pay rent to absentee landlords. Paying for the privilege of growing GM potatoes sounds strangely familiar. And we couldn't be making renewable fuels like poteen from GM potatoes anyway...

Next some of the Permaculture group got involved in an open mic night in the Poitín Stil in Carrick-On-Shannon.
With a bit of lateral thinking, we came up with the name "Pucheen" for our evolving collective of artists, organic growers and haktivists. Based on the German word Putsch and the Irish suffix 'een' or 'ín' meaning small, our new spelling came to mean the small revolution, incorporating ideas such as "small is beautiful", relocalization, diy culture, permaculture and low-impact sustainable living. And there ye have it - Pucheen!!