A worn fiver, a homeless man... and a conversation that has left me sick to my stomach

IT wasn’t the response I expected and it completely floored me. A homeless man came up to my friends and me as we enjoyed a pre-dinner drink outside a Dublin pub and asked if we had any change to help him get the money together for a hostel bed.

I rummaged around for coins but I had only 33 cent and I didn’t want to insult him, so I took out my wallet and gave him a €5 note. His eyes welled up. ‘You’re a god to me,’ he said quietly, and then repeated it. ‘You’re a god to me.’

I didn’t feel much like a god. It was only a fiver and I was acutely aware that the pint in my hand had cost an astonishing €6.70, so I hadn’t even handed over the cost of a single drink. To him, though, it was a help, another few quid towards getting off the street for the night.

But he wasn’t the only person to approach me on Wednesday night. I gave a few euro too to another man who, as it happens, I also had met on my last visit to the city, and over the course of the night was asked for money by about ten people of all ages, including an elderly Roma woman and a young girl who looked completely out of it on drugs.

Indeed, after a while, as you look at people walking down the street, you become adept at predicting which of them will stop in front of you. Even if they are well dressed, there’s something to the gait, a careworn lethargy that is palpable even from a distance. Most seem to be fighting a losing battle to hold onto dignity – they have to ask for money but you can see they clearly don’t want to. Reliance on the generosity of strangers must be psychologically crushing.

There is danger, too. Homeless people have been attacked and, in one unthinkably disgraceful incident on Grafton Street in 2012, a group of young men laughed as they urinated on a homeless man sleeping in an archway.

Shocking

Homelessness is perhaps the single greatest challenge facing Dublin. It is staggering to see this level of need on the streets of a European capital city, and the statistics are devastating. The annual count of rough sleepers undertaken on November 30 by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive found 91 on the streets and another 61 at the Merchant’s Quay Ireland Night Café – that is a total of 152 people who could not find beds for the night. But, as Sam McGuinness of Dublin Simon, the homeless charity, pointed out at the time, ‘it must be emphasised that this is the absolute minimum number and it does not account for the hidden homeless – people who are couch-surfing, sleeping in internet cafés, temporary B&Bs and hospitals’.

The good news is that the total was down compared with the same night in 2014, but only because more emergency beds have been made available since the scandalous death of Jonathan Corrie in a Dublin doorway just metres from Leinster House last year.

The numbers in shelter have risen dramatically, though. In October, the most recent month for which figures are available, 2,376 adults were in emergency accommodation in Dublin and, to our shame, 1,425 children.

I live in Co. Wexford and, when I come to Dublin, I usually hang out in my old haunts in Dún Laoghaire and Dalkey, and only very seldom venture into the city, so to me, homelessness is largely invisible. It is a problem I have little direct experience of, so when I actually am confronted by it, I find it shocking.

Friends from overseas who visit never fail to remark on it and, in my own experience, only San Francisco, among major cities in the developed world, seems to have more homeless people on the streets than Dublin.

Wednesday night was unseasonably warm. In Temple Bar, there were people drinking on the street wearing only T-shirts, and a snow machine outside one of the pubs sending flurries of flakes onto their heads was completely incongruous – it felt more like September than December. That was good news for rough sleepers, who at this time of year usually also have to contend with plummeting temperatures, wind and rain.

Even so, few people in the whole of their mental health would choose to sleep on the streets in any weather. There is no single cause of homelessness, though the economic downturn has exacerbated the problem. Young people who have come out of foster care or institutional care, and people discharged from mental health institutions, are at greater risk if they have no-one to care for them. Family break-ups can send some, particularly men, onto the streets. And, of course, addiction to alcohol, drugs or both often is the start of a spiral into homelessness; after all, Jonathan Corrie’s parents had twice bought him houses but he sold them to fund his addictions.

Causes

And that’s why handing over a fiver didn’t seem to me to be much use, because getting a person off the streets for one night is like applying a BandAid to a mortal wound.

The Government actually is doing more to combat homelessness and there are more beds available than ever before, but the provision of adequate levels of long-term social housing still is years away, and spending on mental health treatment has been consistently reduced.

What we have ended up with, then, is a system that largely treats only the symptom of the homelessness problem and not the causes of it.

A week from today, most of us will sit down with our loved ones at tables heaving with food – smoked salmon, turkey, ham, mash, roasters, carrots, parsnips, trifle, pudding, cake, mince pies – and we will not give a second thought to those who will be on the streets with nothing.

In Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick, and countless other cities and towns, they will wander aimlessly about the streets, isolated, lonely and forgotten. If they are lucky, they will get some hot food at one of the Christmas charity dinners, but then will find themselves back out in the open in an almost empty city, asking anyone they bump into for a few quid towards the price of a bed for the night, something the rest of us take completely for granted.

We all know why we celebrate Christmas. For Christians, it is the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, the day God sent His son to walk among us and teach us the values we still allegedly hold dear, not least the fact that we should love our neighbour.

That person doesn’t always live in the house next door. He or she sometimes lives on the streets, walking up to people outside pubs and asking for money. And, for being handed a fiver – a miserable fiver I wouldn’t have missed if it fell out of my pocket.

I don’t think anyone should ever have to look at a stranger and say ‘you’re a god to me’. It was profoundly upsetting.

If you would like to donate some money to help the great work of Dublin Simon, log on to dubsimon.ie for details.