This is not a manifesto. It's something simpler — an honest account of what Briar House is, where it came from, and why I believe it matters. If you've found your way here because someone you love is in trouble, or because you work in this field and you're looking for something that makes more clinical sense, or because you're trying to figure out whether this project is real — this is for you.
Briar House is a residential addiction recovery centre being built on working farmland in rural County Meath. It is body-first. It is trauma-informed. It is not 12-Step. And it exists because the gap between what people in addiction need and what they're currently offered in Ireland is unconscionable.
I've spent a long time arriving here. Longer than I realised.
Where This Started
I came to Ireland to support a loved one who was struggling. I never left.
What followed was 18 years of progressive operations leadership across global technology companies — Xerox, SAP, Slack, Crimson Education, and Equiem. I built systems. I designed customer experiences. I learned how to make complex things work well for real people. And through all of it, the thing I couldn't stop thinking about was recovery — not as a professional interest, but because addiction kept touching the people I love.
Several people close to me have walked this road. I've watched them encounter a treatment system that is chronically underfunded, frequently oversubscribed, and structurally unable to meet them where they actually are — which is in their bodies, not just in their heads. Some haven't even made it as far as finding treatment options, but this is a different story.
I trained as an occupational therapist before my career took me into business. The philosophy of OT — that people heal through doing, not just through talking — has informed everything I've built since. During my training, I worked in mental health institutions. I saw what they offered. Over time, I saw more clearly what they didn't.
And I experienced nervous system dysregulation myself — severe asthma with a psychosomatic root. The mind-body connection isn't something I read about. I lived it.
The Gap We're Building Into
Here is what the Irish treatment landscape looks like right now. The HSE funds a limited number of residential beds. Waiting lists stretch for weeks or months. Private options exist, but they are overwhelmingly talk-therapy-dominant, often 12-Step-based, and rarely incorporate somatic or nutritional interventions in any clinically serious way.
Meanwhile, the evidence base has shifted. We know that addiction is not a failure of willpower or even, simplistically, a disease of the brain in isolation. It is a disorder of the whole organism. The nervous system. The gut. The inflammatory cascade. The attachment system. The circadian rhythm that has been shattered by years of substance use.
Recovery that starts with the body isn't an alternative approach. It's a corrective to decades of treating addiction as if it lives only in the mind.
People leave residential treatment every day in Ireland having done important psychological work — and return to a body still locked in survival mode, a gut microbiome devastated by years of alcohol or drug use, a sleep-wake cycle that doesn't function. We call this treatment. I think we can do better.
What Briar House Is
Briar House is structured as a social enterprise. It starts with four to five private beds, scaling to ten as we build the evidence base and add insurer-funded and HSE-funded places.
The model is built on several core pillars:
- Somatic Experiencing (SE) as the primary therapeutic modality — working directly with the nervous system rather than relying solely on cognitive processing
- A gut-healing nutritional protocol grounded in emerging evidence on the gut-brain axis, treated as a clinical pillar rather than a wellness add-on
- Farm-based therapeutic work — animals, kitchen garden, land management, beekeeping — drawn from the occupational therapy principle that meaningful activity is itself a regulatory force
- Seasonal programme architecture aligned to circadian biology, because the evidence on light exposure, sleep, and neurological recovery demands we take the structure of the day seriously
- Daily rhythm as the primary regulatory structure — not the therapy timetable, but the day itself: waking, eating, working, resting
This is not a luxury retreat or an institution. It has elements of both, what more importantly, it is a place where recovery happens because the day itself is worth getting up for.
Why Me, Why This
I'm aware that founding a recovery centre is an unusual second act after nearly two decades in technology operations. But I'd argue the skill set translates more directly than it might seem. Systems design. Process architecture. Customer experience — which is to say, the experience of the person at the centre of the system. Making complex, multi-stakeholder operations actually work.
What I bring that most operations people don't is the clinical lens. The OT training. The personal experience of nervous system dysregulation. The years spent learning about attachment theory, codependency, and somatic dimensions of trauma — not from textbooks first, but from life.
And I live on a smallholding in rural County Meath. I keep animals. I grow food. I live according to a seasonal rhythm that regulates my own nervous system in ways I can feel. The farm isn't a marketing concept for Briar House. It's the proof of concept. It showed me, in my own body, that a structured, land-based daily rhythm does something that no amount of sitting in a room talking can fully replicate.
Building in the Open
I'm going to build this in public, because the Irish recovery sector needs more honest conversation about what treatment can look like, what it costs to build, and what stands in the way. And I wish to transfer some of my hope and inspiration to you through our experience of making this project real.
There will be setbacks. There will be planning decisions, funding applications, clinical governance questions, and moments where the gap between vision and reality feels enormous. I'll write about those too.
If you're a practitioner — an addiction counsellor, a GP who has run out of places to refer, a social worker navigating the HSE system — I want you to know what we're building and why. If you're a family member searching for options at two in the morning, I want you to find something here that feels honest.
Briar House is not open yet. But the work has started, and it's real.
More soon.
— Sarah Machon, Founder