Ep. 9 - Panel 2A - Part 2 - Invisible men: 'Is there a way back to me, for me?' - Tommy Coombes (MU)

NPPSH Conference

Questions of voice, agency, participation and empowerment are central to the practice of community development, and for this reason it has been has been described as a subversive occupation (Ife 2013). Its way of working is to challenge and question the done thing, the taken-for-granted. Yet, funding cuts and structural changes within the field since 2008 have seen the spaces for community work increasingly narrowed and squeezed (Harvey 2015; Community Work Ireland 2017). This situation places community workers in a dilemma: do they cease telling uncomfortable stories and cease being true to the values of community work; do they step away from long term community struggles? This panel details research from the field of community work that speaks back to such restrictive forces as communities and practitioners struggle to find their voices: From the voices of marginalised older men in Dublin city, to a community finding their voice when faced with the threat of fracking and the voices of community workers themselves as they navigate a path for critical practice in neoliberal times. Bringing together three community worker who are engaged in research, this panel seeks, as Okri evocatively suggests, to ‘breach and confound the accepted frontier of things’ by amplifying unseen voices and placing them at the centre of conversations about social change in Ireland. Tommy Coombes manages the Bluebell Community Development Project. His doctoral research, at the Department of Applied Social Studies, Maynooth University, explores stories of the lived experiences of older men residing in a sheltered housing complex in Dublin.