our manifesto

we are queer sheds

Born of need, shaped by longing, and driven by love. We are creating the spaces we’ve always needed but rarely found. Not just for survival, but for joy, for making, for being our full queer selves.

We are more than a response to exclusion. We are reimagining the space we inhabit and growing something new. In cities and faoin tuath, we are creating sheds that hold skills, stories, laughter, grief, resistance, and rest.

We have felt disconnected from others, from ourselves, and from the natural world. Some of us are still searching for belonging. We are gathering now to build it together.

We believe in the power of place and sharing of skills. In hands busy with tools, voices sharing knowledge, and roots that deepen across generations.

We honour queerness not just as identity, but as a way of being. Radical, resilient, relational, and rooted in care.

We are not a service; we are communities.

We are not performance; we are practice.

We are not extractive; we are regenerative.

We do not gate keep; we welcome.

A Queer Shed is a hedge school and a healing space. A site of belonging. A place to build, fix, sing, grow, ferment, and mess about. It is where grief is composted and joy is cultivated. Where care is resistance. Where being together matters more than fitting in.

We show how the world can be different, and we grow that world with our own hands. We are non-hierarchical and interdependent. We are soft and serious. We are deeply practical and wildly imaginative. We seek queer belonging beyond the mainstream.

We believe queerness belongs everywhere: in the soil, in the workshop, around the fire, at the kitchen table. We are reclaiming land and skill, heritage and tradition, story and kinship.

We celebrate the spaces that hold us, the ones carved out through courage, protest, joy, and care. We honour those who fought for them and those who tend them still. We walk alongside our peers, knowing that there is more to build. More to dream. More space to grow, together.

We show up in all our identities, visible or not. We recognise the intersecting forces of exclusion that shape our lives and communities. We work across difference, with care, to create something rooted, something blooming.

This is a meitheal of queers, crafting culture, building power, and making space. Not just safe space, but brave space. Soft space. Fierce space.

We are not waiting for permission. We are gathering now. Join us.

Signed

Founding members of the Queer Sheds Network

This manifesto was created using input from the founding members at a workshop in Clare in 2025.