One homeless person's account of life on the streets of Dublin

dublin | miscellaneous | feature

Thursday May 15, 2003 15:38

by IMC Editorial Group - IMC Ireland

One night I was woken up by a Garda, by him booting me in the ribs, because, he said, `I can't be arsed bending down and I don't like touching shit with my hands!'

My name is David and I am homeless. I was asked to write a piece on the reason for my situation and my experiences of being homeless. This is it. I am sorry if it comes across as a sob story, it isn't meant to and I am not looking for sympathy or for people to feel sorry for me. As it is things are looking up for me at last but it probably does come across that way because after a long time spent thinking about it, there aren?t many good things that I can say about it.

Contrary to popular belief homeless people haven't brought the situation on themselves and do not choose to live that way, as is the case with me. After my mother passed on, I decided that I wanted to get away from Liverpool and go back to my home country of Ireland, (having left when I was six or seven because my Mum and Dad split up, my Mum being from Liverpool she took me back to be with her parents.) as I had no family left there, being born an only child and late on in my parents life (my Father had passed on two years earlier and I had no family in Ireland either.) I had nothing to keep me there and I felt I needed a change.

Continue to the rest of the story.

Threshold has some good resources which indicate that if David were to wait for "social housing" he could wait as long as 12 years.
More of this research is at Focus Ireland calls into question (pg. 126) the role that land speculation and the planning process in the provision of "social housing".
As part of a response to the situation the evangelical Dominican Friars run the Merchant's Quay Project and the Simon Community and St. Vincent de Paul undertake similar work.
However David can rest assured that the proper authorities have the problem in hand. As long ago as the 21st of January 2002, Minister Bobby Molloy, in a criticism of a Focus Ireland report said "[...]There is no escaping the fact that there are far too many people homeless and this Government is totally committed to dealing with the problem of homelessness. We have made considerable improvements in the way we are addressing the problem."