25th March 2019:
Unexpected interview by German TV crew in Dublin for 10 days; pure chance I am filmed with my input about homelessness in Ireland. There is even mention of my book Fortune Favours the Brave by Michelle Marcella Clarke.
Amazon: UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1912639610/
The documentary by German team:
Dear All
I want to say a big thank you for your participation and support. Unfortunately this is only in french and english. I couldn´t put all the interviews in this 30 minutes but every interview was helpful for me to get the whole picture.
It will be on air tonight at 9:40pm. But here you can watch it from now on:
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/084751-001-A/re-dublin-und-die-silicon-docks/
The above link must have had a time limit but I can report the house referred to is now covered by the Repair and Lease Scheme 2017 administered through Peter McVerry Trust: Details as follows:-
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Historic writings regarding homelessness
December 1st, 2015
Another year, the homeless crisis worsens. Promises followed by promises and yet too many people are found on pavements wrapped in soggy wet sleeping bags with no place to call home.
To gain a little perspective and to focus our actions on finding solutions urgently in a country that has space in abundance, I include articles from the past which tell us policymakers and government officials are not doing what should be done. We need more social housing; we know that many properties in Ireland are vacant, we know local authority houses remain as voids for long periods of time. I would suggest twitter @ReusingDublin @Whatif and especially an article written by @roryhearne November 2014 which highlights the vacant properties in each county. Allsops publish in our weekly papers properties that are for sale; these are mainly forced sales and often prices are as low as e130,000. Surely a deal can be done with NAMA to buy up these properties.
Tonight people are marching from the GPO to the Dail gates to protest about a crisis that is a ‘Tsunami’. One family, we are told is becoming homeless every 10 hours. https://youtu.be/DiWomXklfv8 For those who remember Ralph McTell ‘Streets of London’ – homelessness a problem everywhere
Sadly on the cold pavement there is some cardboard to protect the person from the cold.
The person is hidden inside the sleeping bag, not to be seen, no collection looking for a hostel bed tonight, just shelter from the harsh reality that is their world, not of choice but of neglect in our society to provide for vulnerable people.
The Sunday Independent – Judge Michael Reilly, our Inspector of Prisons, has produced a damning report which details that as many as 14 people last year left our prisons and died from suicide within days of release. To compound this lack of provision by the State for their immediate needs and most importantly to provide assistance to re-activate their lives, too many other atrocities go unreported. What comes to mind are the two pure innocent children in Athlone, sisters, aged 6 and 10, who were harmlessly playing children’s games in a home when a man just out of prison stole savagely their precious youth away by sexually abusing them in a most horrific manner. This man returned to jail but their lives and all concerned are confined to their own prison of memories.
There is what only can be called a ‘wilful blindness’ to mental health provision in Ireland and it is essential that the intentions of the report ‘Vision for Change’ be updated and implemented. Proper public health provision related to mental health, addictions, is paramount. The dots need to be connected and the underlying theme of inadequate mental health provision can tracked through to homelessness, to prison. The challenge is to deal with the problems early before they destroy lives.
Homelessness: Fr Peter McVerry writes a piece in the Irish Times today.
His opinion and it is like that of Alice Leahy (Trust) from people who engage with people in need of care who are homeless.
For decades now Fr McVerry and others have witnessed what circumstances can lead to homelessness. It is time now for us to listen because what is apparent is that there is a ‘homeless industry’ being created where the government policy is not empowerment of the individual who finds themselves without a home but an administration of a bureaucracy whose vested interest is their own ie maintaining themselves in employment. Charity is becoming a dirty word and rightly so as we see Dublin City Council, the HSE, paying out tranches of monies to what can only be called subsidiaries. These subsidiaries too often masquerade as charities, NGO’s or evangelical churches for that matter.
Fr Peter McVerry states that 6 people are becoming homeless every week while only 2 people each day manage to escape homelessness.
He reminds us about the exits (note this is 2014; it is now December 2015 and the situation is deteriorating rapidly)
- Social housing must be sourced
- Private rented accommodation (rent allowance now inadequate and people are being forced out of their homes on renewal dates, while landlords seek market rent, which is their entitlement).
- Voluntary agencies (they can only provide between 1-2% of demand)
- Voids in local authority estates need to be up and running in a 10-12 week time-frame
The promise of the State is that they will end homelessness by 2016.
The reality is detailed in Fr McVerry’s article and the message is shame on us. We need to be instruments of change.
To conclude:
‘There has been a 90% drop in social housing output between 2007 and 2011 resulting in a 100% increase in the social housing waiting list, from 43,700 in 2005 to 89,900 in 2013. The Government has allocated funding to build 449 new homes over the next two years – which will reduce the waiting list by 2%’. We are talking about a needle in a haystack for the required provision of homes for people who are in need of same.
January 28th, 2014 16:39
Charities & regulation. Who will sit on the interim board?
Homelessness, and the abusive industry that has been created needs urgent attention. Day in day out we meet young people on our streets begging for money to pay the hostel for the night. When does this stop? These people need a pathway to work. FAS failed them dismally and now we are told it is the much reduced staff quota of Solas will be dealing with the unemployed. Many of the homeless have other problems like addictions, herein rest more ‘preying’ industries that are without regulation. The objective is methadone and clean needles but where is the public health system we have been promised that will provide people with the necessary opportunities to explore their life options. The monstrosity created called the HSE has tentacles into every known charity but with no accountability as we have witnessed by the Rehab and CRC shambles.
Rehab is in the news. The Chief Executive, Angela Kerins, who represents so many more of those privileged elites within the Charities, NGO, sector is out there for the ‘flogging’. Phoenix magazine has been the outlier with suggestions that this woman earned in excess of 400,000 euros for her all in package for working for Rehab, a charity. The HSE funds and the Charitable Lotteries provide vast amounts of money to Rehab and others, which is their means of delegating their responsibilities to others at the cost of those most vulnerable in society.
The Sunday Business Post and Tom McGurk makes some interesting points about Charities that people, at every level, need to take account of:-
To briefly summarise: setting up a charity is a relatively simple operation requiring little or no official input. One can set up a charity for a multitude of causes, which explain why there are more than 7,000 of them in the country; there are more than 600 Irish charities dealing with Africa alone.
There is virtually no regulation, other than the requirement to make annual tax returns. Astonishingly, there is still no requirement for any percentage of the income raised to be paid to the charity; so legally one could set up a charity and pay 99 per cent of the income to those running it – including oneself – and leave only 1 per cent to the charity purpose. That would be perfectly legal….
This is a shocking indictment. To me it highlights why the mental health/addiction/neurological outcomes industry in Ireland is so not fit for purpose if you are not one of the lucky people to have private health insurance. It is my belief that something as fundamental as mental health/addiction/neurological should be about basic public health provision. It should be similar to the provision in Canada.
What we know from the Rehab scenario where the HSE paid over 100 million euros in 3 years to Rehab is that they are outsourcing what it is their job to provide and the outcome is the impact on people in homeless situations, asylum seeker hostels and even in prisons.
Transparency and accountability is what we need. The HSE and its tentacles need to be clipped so that people are not exploited. To those who are the collectors of cash at the cold face, they too need to question those elites who run the charities because in the absence of this common sense the abuse is allowed to continue.
November 14th, 2013 16:30
Homelessness (Reply to Seiorse who suggested we get permissionto publish the poem Bags and distribute it)
by Michelle Clarke
The man outside Tesco has taken the spot from another man who has a problem with his leg, their story is ‘stereotypical’ the same and that is they are begging for money for their hostel preferably so that they can book a week in advance. To be sitting on a pavement as the weather changes for the realities of a hard winter makes their situation all the more unacceptable because you know their plight is that they fall between the cracks of the social model and because they have no utility bill, no fixed address, they have no social welfare. For some reason these people are displaced from their original homes, it might be divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, disability, ill-health and in particular people with mental health problems but what it does tell you is that there are people in our society who need special involvement from Social Services and who do not receive them.
I walk up to next shop and Person B reminds me that I went in one door of Tesco Upper Baggot Street the last day and came out the other and forgot about him. What probably happened is that I was on the mobile phone and just forgot about person B. Earlier in the day another character came up to me and as usual asked for his Euro; when B noticed he admonished me and said why did I give to him because he had State benefits, a home and spent his day gambling in the bookies. This is the life of the Street. It’s harsh, it’s uncertain, it’s cold. It is about asking for money because you have nowhere to sleep for the night and ad infinitum. The poem reflects the narrative so well and the truth is this hardship causes too many to die, too young, without an opportunity to know the difference. Ozzie was our local. When he died, we all realized that each had a little of his character to remember him by. He looked so much older than his years. He had attributes but society sidelined him to homelessness, begging and who knows what else.
Stereotypes, monologues of the elites who have no empathy, the homeless industry and charities, (those without the objective to eradicate homelessness because it becomes their bread and butter), those chief executives and their flock who earn well in excess of £150,000, the beneficial owners of the hostels who receive payment for the beds in the dormitories from the overly bureaucratic sectors of government and in particular the HSE. Pruning is essential and a fresh look is urgently needed to tackle the homelessness crisis and the “Underclass” emergence in the streets of our city Dublin and other cities on this Island of Ireland.
The internet is like access to literacy which empowers the people. With ease, the majority of us can access what happens in other countries with the homeless crisis. We are told that the EU has the Invisible Hand and social is a strong contributor. We know social plays a considerably less significant part of the American belief system. Let’s use the internet to take a look at San Francisco – Think Progress publication.
There is new survey about homelessness in the US (begging there refers to panhandlers) – downtown San Franciso. What is interesting is that it challenges the myths and the interesting part is that the myths there, resemble the same myths that apply here on the Island of Ireland. You might ask how or why? Well there seems to be a conventional wisdom ‘that those on the sidewalk asking for a dollar are lazy freeloaders who will use the money for alcohol or drugs’. The danger is when the media are biased towards this view and use the airwaves to promote the myths. In the US, Fox media and a Mr John Stossel have become the mouthpiece for the perpetrators of the myths and he has broadcast certain messages which are heavily biased and harmful to “beggars”. Stossel reports (we know only too well that so many of us use these very same stereotypes) messages such as “I had heard some people beg for a living and make big bucks – $80,000 a year in some cases….You shouldn’t really give to these street people…..You are really supporting alcoholism and drug problems”.
Thankfully this spurred on The Unions Square Business Improvement District (a collection of 500 property owners downtown San Francisco), to fund a research team. They took a two day period, in March. They spoke to 400 people who gave money to panhandlers/beggars over the past year. Thankfully, they can refute the Mythology. They found which I doubt is not in anyway different to what one would find in Dublin that ‘the typical ‘panhandler’ or ‘beggar’ is a ‘disabled middle-aged single male who is a racial minority (maybe not yet in Ireland) and makes less than $25 per day despite panhandling seven days a week for more than five years; in fact 94% of these meager earnings are spent on food; furthermore they found that contrary to the myth people hold that ‘they prefer to live on the streets’ is wrong and that only 3% of panhandlers don’t want housing’.
Words like underclass, victims, mentally ill without out access to proper medical services, lack of education, sparse provision of social workers, drug addicts maintained on methadone for decades without a source of education to help them become working contributors to society by access to education, must define Ireland as different, because we are small enough to make changes. Ignorance is no defence. We need to avoid victimology and create opportunities by seeking out alternatives other than a life on the streets begging.
Fr Peter McVerry’s name is the man that is accredited for helping the homeless.
His website provides the facts: it provides statistical information on homelessness and Peter McVerry Trust Services.
Homelessness:
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7 is the average number of new presentations of homelessness in Dublin per day. (2012)
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30% of women now account for just over 30% of Ireland’s homeless population.
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94 is the minimum number of rough sleepers in Dublin, based on rough sleeper count for April 2013.
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307 of girls aged 19 or under recorded as homeless in the 2011 census.
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3,808 is the number of homeless in Ireland recorded in census 2011.
Stark figures for such a small population.
The US survey states that 60% make $25 a day or less, if this is so in Ireland and the hostels cost in excess of e60 per week plus the addition of the what HSE, the DCC, the NGO’s, Charities pay to the private owners of the hostels, it makes it quite a pitiful existence with no hope of ever leaving this culture of dependency which is necessary to keep wealth with commerce and focused on the privileged.
Why do people give to beggars! The finding is simple. Empathy and a fear that you or a family member may one day be a beggar; if this is so
come back to the words of wise man who worked in the legal profession for decades and said ‘The world is made up of the Takers and the Taken’.
Remember when you see a beggar on the street, chances are through the food they eat, the drink they drink, the accommodation they use, they too and possibly more so are paying tax and re-investing in Ireland Inc; these are paying real indirect taxes daily and recycling money in the economy.
Sath Samh 03, 2007 18:46
Plain People of Ireland – we want to participate in the “Carnival Ride”