Every bit of the Genesis Cafe fit-out is reimagined from waste material, much of it pulled out of skips
Every bit of the Genesis Cafe fit-out is reimagined from waste material, much of it pulled out of skipstown. There are light fittings made from old sewing machines.
A high table is an ancient bicycle topped with timber. Underfoot are repurposed tiles and scaffolding planks. The bones of the once-derelict building are exposed in its bare brick. The loo roll hangs on a piece of salvage from the horsey world.
“Take just a ‘bit’” the sign reads above it, in case you don’t realise the dispenser was once a horse’s bit. This whole cafe is made of scrap. Every bit of the fit-out is reimagined from waste material, much of it hauled from skips by builder Kevin McGuire, and given new life in this labour of love.
When he first peered in here in the depths of winter 2024, the damp derelict building was typical of thousands of forgotten places in towns all over Ireland. Now it smells of fresh coffee and scones and the place is buzzing with happy customers. Builders are turning the floors above into apartments. , one of a family of 12, nine boys and three girls.
His dad died when he was young, and he left for London with his brother to work on the building sites.
“I learned on the job. My brother was a good carpenter and I learned from him. ” He progressed to foreman, and on a trip home one Christmas he met a guy who told him there was demolition work in Monaghan. That work brought him to the town 27 years ago.
“Being from Mayo, a lot of people thought I was a guard. It’d always be the first question they’d ask me. ” He met his wife Pamela, and they have five sons. When recession hit in 2008 he lost his job, and not long after that everything changed.
His eldest son from his first marriage was in a serious crash.
“It was basically dire straits,” he explains, struggling to hold back tears. ‘On the Sunday she had a temperature and then everything changed’: Losing limbs to sepsisU2’s Adam Clayton and others on their boarding school days: ‘Being separated from the age of 8 was a trauma’ Eventually the doctors told them there was no hope for the 21-year-old.
“I remember them bringing us into a room with all the scanners like computers and they had it all on each one, showing the brain, showing the damaged part, and saying he’s going to be in a vegetative state and he’s going to be on life-support, and there was nothing more they could do. ” McGuire turned to prayer, “believing in God and bigger things and better things”.
His son was moved to a specialist ward, where they predicted he would never speak and would not recognise them.
“And then he just started to change, and they couldn’t understand it. ” He was transferred to the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dún Laoghaire, “and they did amazing work with him there for months and months”, to the point where he recovered and returned to his apprenticeship with the ESB. Today he “has no recollection of the accident, he a small little limp. He’s perfectly fine.
” The trauma changed everything for McGuire. He travelled to Africa twice on the missions.
“You see what they could make out of nothing,” he says, “tin huts, houses made out of pallets. ” He came home with a new lens on people struggling with addiction and homelessness. He started buying them coffees, funded tabs in local coffee shops so they could get their own if he wasn’t around.
“I’m no counsellor, but sitting down, listening to someone, that’s a therapy: that you’re there and you care. ” He did a year in applied social studies and psychology. His unemployment benefit allowed him to volunteer around the town, and build up a relationship with “those guys and a lot of others”.
Then two years ago he went through his own bad patch of depression.
“I’d drive down the road and just end up crying and pulling in. ” On the outside he could smile, he said, but inside felt “like a massive storm was going on”. Salvaging materials and creating things with wood was therapeutic. He mulled over the idea of fitting out a coffee truck, realised the upfront costs would be high, and then started looking for an empty shop in Monaghan.
About 17 months ago his now-landlord gave him the key to Mrs Hegarty’s, an old sewing shop on Dublin Street. It had been empty for years and was a blank slate. Papers, letters and other documents from the former business are now housed in a notice board at the back of Genesis.
“Mrs Hegarty and her husband lived here at one point. This was their kitchen. It’s important for people to know that. ” Has he estimated the cost of the fit-out materials?
“I have. It’s zero,” he says. Equipment like the coffee machine had to be bought new, while chairs, stools and bathroom fittings were seconds. The flooring beneath the back room snug where we chat came from a local gym.
He had a quote of €1,600 for hard-wearing lino and couldn’t afford it.
“So I was going to leave the bare concrete. ” Then a friend told him the old black rubber floor tiles from the gym were in a skip. Now they’re here, saved from landfill and looking like an expensive new floor. Waste is a huge, continuous feature of the building trade.
“They price waste into the price,” he says. It is cheaper to throw materials away than spend skilled time repurposing it. He would love to see salvage warehouses set up with tools as workshops where people could go and make things from waste materials. McGuire is thrilled at the reaction of his new customers.
Every item is a conversation point. The doorstop is a heavy iron cobbler’s shoe from another business now gone from the town. There’s a piece of Mayo here too. – the ancient bicycle was his uncle Tommy’s.
“He died a couple of years ago at the age of 93. The bicycle is a part of that from me mum’s side. He was a lovely quiet soul. ” As towns struggle with dereliction, isolation and the loss of community spaces in town centres, Genesis is a hopeful idea.
“You could replicate this in every town and village in the country,” McGuire believes. “There are places that haven’t been opened for years and you get all sorts of old stuff. It’s just about going and doing it.
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