Helping the homeless – five nights a week
By Aura McMenamin
Bernadette Fagan from Lucan spends up to five nights a week delivering hot meals, tea, chocolate and clothes to Dublin’s rough sleepers.
The Weight Watchers Clerk from Arthur Griffith Park prefers to take on the capital’s south side, walking up and down Dawson Street, Grafton Street and the surrounding streets where most doorways are filled with people in sleeping bags or on cardboard, sleeping alone or huddled together.
It’s Friday night in early August but the weather is already beginning to change, and autumn is approaching. Bernadette is joined by fellow volunteers Rodney and Alfredo, and admits that it’s difficult to get hold of volunteers during the summer.
She did her first soup run for mobile soup kitchen Humans Too in December, despite the arthritis in her legs and knees.
Bernadette recalls her first soup run: “Very enjoyable. I was sitting on the bus thinking ‘is this the right word?’
“A couple of weeks later, you get to know people and I’ve gone home on the bus with tears in my eyes”
No matter what time of the year, tea is always appreciated. Their supply of chocolate and other sugary food quickly dries up.
Bernadette, who said she never used social media before volunteering, will often post appeals for items on Lucan community Facebook pages. The Humans Too team store it in a space off Aungier Street.
She explains: “I put up requests every week, a wish list. Every bit of food in that food pantry is donated by people in Lucan.”
While we walk up Mercer Street, a man stops her and asks for a sleeping bag. Bernadette says no and the man moves on.
While hot food and chocolate will always go quickly, Bernadette says it’s sleeping bags that are the hardest to keep in supply.
“We’re always looking for sleeping bags,” she says. “If we got €10,000, we wouldn’t be able to get enough sleeping bags.”
Humans Too isn’t just their name, it seems to be in their ethos. Bernadette will often do what many people passing by would consider unthinkable. She’ll give someone a hug, or sit down on a piece of cardboard next to them to ask them how they’re doing.
Bernadette said: “I think it is very important. People would walk past them all day, they wouldn’t recognise them at all. They wouldn’t say hello . . . anything.”
She admits it’s difficult to not get attached. While she walks with Rodney and Alfredo she remembers waiting at the Polish embassy for two hours while she waited for Mario, who sleeps rough, to help him acquire a passport and even sourced a woman who would translate for him.
The number of homeless in Ireland is slowly creeping to 8,000. The latest figures from Focus Ireland show 7,941 in June, with 78 new families becoming homeless that month. It doesn’t always account for the ‘hidden homeless’ – perpetual couch surfers and families forced to move in again with parents, generations squashed together under one roof.
Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy warned this week that ‘changes are coming’ as the government pledges to tackle the roughly 180,000 vacant homes around the country.
The Lucan woman who ‘never got involved in a protest or march before’ spent a few weeks in Apollo House, which aimed to alleviate the capital’s homeless problem during Christmas.
Bernadette remembers naively thinking it would be a turning point: “I met this 23-year-old in November and the very first time I met him I asked him if I could get him anything and he asked me for a rope. He told me, ‘I’m not doing another Christmas on the streets.’ ”
