Four years ago John Evoy (former staff member and current Board Member of WWETB) won an Impact Award from the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland association for creating a space where men with time on their hands could hang out.
It sounds simple enough but the Impact award is not given lightly and in this case it was awarded for both the necessity of
the service and the speed at which it was rolled out in Ireland.
Today there are 400 plus Men’s Sheds across the country courtesy of Evoy’s brainwave. "I saw the example in Australia where the Men’s Sheds originated and it had grown organically," explains Evoy. "I could see it was a great idea but also that for it to be of maximum benefit, it needed to grow quickly."
In fact, it grew so quickly that by Christmas 2014 Evoy himself was burnt out and needed to take time out. He acknowledges the irony that the CEO of the Irish Men’s Sheds Association had to take time out, but the explosion of sheds had taken its toll on his health and this time around he recognised the symptoms.
Evoy explains that the Men’s Sheds has a very simple principle. ‘It is for men with time on their hands to hang out,’ he says. "It is not to promote positive mental health or physical well-being or to provide a social outlet for lonely men – and yet it does all those things organically."
Evoy knows first-hand the reasons why he might have needed a Men’s Shed before they existed in Ireland. He was born to the land and was expected to farm. A short stint in an agricultural college was followed by running the family dairy farm and he hated every minute of it."The land I loved but the farming I really did not enjoy," he said. He turned to alcohol and drugs to minimise the loneliness. It only left him worse off, depressed and in a bad way. He struggled on for most of his twenties trying to reconcile his career and his life but it was only making him miserable.
"Sometimes an only son has no choice but to farm," he says. "It might be a privilege for many but for me it was pure hardship. "Finally, aged 27, I stopped and decided I had to change career. It was a tough conversation to have with my father (my mother died when I was very young leaving my sister and I to be brought up by my father) but he and my grandmother wanted the best for me. They supported me."
Living in rural Ireland
Life as a recovering farmer