'People die on streets all the time. Ever since people have been living on the streets, they've been dying on the streets," a homeless friend told me recently.
Back in the 1980s, when I was a child, a friend and I found a homeless man dead on a bench in a city centre park.
Just like many homeless deaths, it wasn't meaningful enough to make the news. Yet something has changed in recent weeks.
The death of two homeless people in Cork - Michelle O'Riordan, a 27-year-old mother, and 53-year-old Patrick O'Driscoll - who drowned in the River Lee, and the death of John Corrie in a Dublin doorway opposite the Dail has provided a watershed moment.
The Gardai didn't treat any of the deaths as suspicious, though sadly all three suffered from serious addictions problems. "It's only because he (Jonathan Corrie) died close to Leinster House that everyone is up in arms about it," a homeless friend told me last week.
"A lot of the time, people on the street will have used heroin and goofed off. It makes you feel really warm for a while and then when you fall asleep your body temperature drops. That's the way it is, and there's not much the Government can do about heroin abuse."
In a bid to find out how people ended up on the streets in the first place, I spent a few months talking to rough sleepers in what turned out to be the lead-up to John Corrie's death.
From hearing heartbreaking personal stories, in many cases I found homelessness is as much a mental health issue as it is an economic issue. Trying to keep people off the streets and in safe accommodation can be extremely difficult if they have addiction and mental health issues.
"I had it all - five children, a husband, a car, a roof over my head. One year later, I'm the dregs of society. My children are in care and I'm sleeping outside a fast food shop. All because of heroin," one well-spoken woman informed me.
Another woman had travelled to Dublin from the country town where she originally lived, so her family wouldn't find out she was sleeping rough. "It's all because of this," she said, lifting up a small bottle of cheap beer outside the Customs House on a frosty morning. "I know people who had five shops, children, money in the bank, two mortgages - and within nine months they were on the street drinking wine," said the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Christy Burke.
It makes you wonder how far things had gone for family, friends and communities to turn their backs on people and for them to end up in a doorway.
Source: Barbara McCarthy, Irish Independent, 16/12/14
Safer Student Nights
eBulletin
Poll
