A new community café opening at Manorhamilton Castle

Fulacht Fiadh Café opens this Thursday 27th of May

Fulacht Fiadh Café will officially open its doors to the public. After a successful soft opening last week the café’s grand opening will be happening this Thursday.

Fulacht Fiadh Cafe is a Community Café & Local Produce Shop in Manorhamilton Castle, North Leitrim. The cafe is a co-operatively run space for both the local community and visitors to the castle grounds offering great locally roasted coffee, home baked cakes, sandwiches and soup and locally sourced produce and goods in their grocers shop. Manorhamilton Castle is a tourism and heritage centre where visitors can learn more about the history of the 17th century castle and the town.

The Café project was started by Aoife Hammond, former manager of the Dublin Food Co-op
in Dublin and Vera Schliebitz, a chef and baker formerly based in Cork City. Both Aoife and Vera moved to the North-West during the pandemic, Aoife is now living in Glenfarne and Vera in Sligo. Both are very excited to be engaging with local people and other independent businesses as part of this new community focused venture in North Leitrim.

‘Manorhamilton already has a great community and cultural scene with the Beepark
Resource Centre, The Farmers Market, the Sculpture Centre and the Glens Centre and we are looking forward to working as part of that community’ – Vera Schliebitz

Café Co-managers Aoife and Vera are working with Gerry Creamer and the committee at Caislean Hamilton CLG to build a tourism and community hub at Manorhamilton Castle.

‘We wanted to create an offering that catered for tourists which includes tours of the castle and rental of electrics bikes to take in the beautiful and underrated North Leitrim scenery but we also wanted to cater to our local community to create a space for us to meet together safely and work outdoors on our community garden and when it’s safe to do so to have a place to have social events, gigs, workshops and talks and most importantly meet over great coffee and delicious food!’ – Aoife Hammond

The crew at the café have been working hard since February renovating the stables where the café is based, building an outdoor seating area and setting out plans for the community gardens. They are looking forward to the return of outdoor dining on June 7th.

Fulacht Fiadh Café is open from Thursday to Sunday 10am – 4pm
Address: Skreeney Road, Manorhamilton, F91NTT2

More about Fulacht Fiadh Café
● The Café provide a place where shoppers can purchase sustainably sourced local goods
● The Café will provide a social distanced meeting place for local community and small community groups
● The Café will have a community garden in the grounds growing food for the cafe, local community and for educational purposes
● The Café will support local growers and producers by selling their goods on the premises. They will also directly support growers and producers trading in the Manorhamilton Friday Farmers market and will encourage collaborative projects.
● Once restrictions have eased The Café will utilise both the indoor and outdoors space in the courtyard and castle grounds for social events, musical events, talks and workshops and markets for the benefit of the local community.

Fulacht Fiadh Café would like to thank Caislean Hamilton CLG, Leitrim County Council and Failte Ireland for supporting us to start up at such a challenging time.

For more information see:
https://www.instagram.com/fulacht_fiadh_cafe
https://www.facebook.com/fulachtfiadhcafe

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