In November at the annual Vincent de Paul Intervarsity, I attended a talk by an elderly nun and was ill-prepared for the legacy her humble speech would leave on me.
In an over-warm and sleepy room this remarkable lady spoke candidly to an intimate and motley audience of college students about the drug-addicts, abuse victims and alcoholics she has worked with throughout her life. We imagined she’d helped many in addiction rehab in the past and present. When I say worked, I mean to engage a unique interpretation of the word. On occasion she helped these people to change their lives, rehabilitating them from homeless, unidentifiable citizens to employable and hygienic people. She spoke equally of less celebrated occasions when she watched powerlessly as her clients gradually killed themselves through a poisonous combination of addiction and an absolute absence of self worth, a powerfully overwhelming pairing for anyone to deal with.
The latest figures from the Homeless Agency, state 2,366 people are homeless in Dublin in 2008. 2,366! That’s a lot of people. Of this number 110 were sleeping rough.
Considering the above statistic it becomes easy to rationalise and thereby justify, the presence of homelessness. It is in the ordinariness of homelessness that the danger lies. In a world where we are encouraged to pursue our own goals and maximise our personal achievement, it is terrifyingly easy to (at best) walk past another human being on the street and either fail to register their presence, or their humanity. At worst, a feeling of smugness or conceit can be sparked, consciously or otherwise, potentially due to one’s own relief at not being in a similarly hopeless situation.
Of course, it is both inaccurate and unhelpful to attribute blame to individual insensitivity and ignorance. There is a collective mind set that has been gradually accepted and ultimately deeply ingrained in our society. This mind set leads to the passivity, which characterises homeless people as dehumanized individuals.
It is easy to walk past a person when you do not consider their humanity. It would become instantly complicated if you knew their name, the dreams they had in childhood, and the path of unfortunate events which lead to their current location on that anonymous square of concrete.
The most uncomfortable aspect of the nun’s talk was hearing the names of the people she worked with. There was Iris, a housewife with children who was arrested numerous times for sleeping on buses before it emerged she was doing so to avoid an abusive husband.
John, who had a pregnant girlfriend and a cocaine addiction. The cocaine addiction unfortunately took precedence, until the authorities intervened and John was offered a rehabilitation programme, succeeded, and now remains reunited (though closely monitored) with his now six-year-old daughter.
I recalled a programme I had seen aired by the BBC entitled Famous, Rich and Homeless. The documentary followed six small time celebrities as they lived on the streets of London for five days. Although painfully unaware at times, the programme highlighted one overwhelming observation, which was sparked during the talk also; anyone can become homeless.
By this, she meant just that, including you. Including me. There are no absolutes guaranteeing exclusion for anyone.
There have recently been a reported a surprising number of businessmen who have lost their jobs and, in order to save face, leave their home each morning in suits but spend their working day begging as their only alternative to support their families.
There are many celebrity figures who were famously homeless at one point of their life, including Daniel Craig and George Orwell. The latter famously wrote one of his best known books based on his brief experience on the streets, Down and Out in Paris and London.
Ripley Bogle, by Irish author Robert McLiam Wilson, records the adventures of a maverick student who dropped out of Cambridge University disillusioned with society and ends up on the streets of London. What is notable about Ripley Bogle is the painfully accurate way McLiam Wilson records the sensations of living on the streets. No doubt due to the autobiographical nature of the book, which was drawn from his own experience of being homeless as a young man. Most troublingly he captures the hopelessness of the situation: “I am twenty-one years old, my name is Ripley Bogle and my occupations are starving, freezing and weeping hysterically”.
Further, the less than amusing realities of hunger and bodily discomfort are recorded, “It suddenly comes to me that I am hungry. Well, perhaps ‘hungry’ is not quite the right word. Bowel witheringly fucking ravenous might well be a more just and measured phrase to describe what I am currently experiencing . . . Have I already mentioned the fact that I haven’t eaten in more than three days? . . . I grew so fucking desperate that I picked a half-eaten hamburger out of a litter bin, cleaned the grit off and wolfed it down with relish.” After reading such an unchecked narrative on the experience of being homeless I find it hard to pretend I can relate to that experience in any way.
I am left with a feeling of hopelessness. With such a large number of homeless people on the streets, what can be done? Do the old myths stand true; that “all homeless people are drug-addled alcoholics, the lowest of society and/or too lazy to help themselves”, “Surely they could just get jobs”, and “If I give them money it would be drunk or smoked or injected within a few hours”
No. Despite years of caution from parents and friends and teachers, I think people are beginning to realise this situation is not that simple, and one should not allow such convenient, familiar thoughts to spur them towards apathy, which is inevitably followed by inaction. Rather, the nun advised that to offer people food vouchers is often more helpful than offering money.
What is needed most though is a change of perception, an overhaul of the casting of homeless people as faceless, inhuman and on the periphery of society. It is only when they are attributed worth and seen as human beings that their position will change and they will elevate themselves, with help, to become active members of society.
However, it is essential for us to remember the irony, as illustrated by Ripley Bogle, “The second thing to be noted is the fact that I am sitting on this frozen bench, threatening to flop over at any minute from pure poverty and all the while I am less that three hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. (This thought has an annoying tendency to make me giggle hysterically.)”
Namely, that none of us are immune to misfortune, and surely society will prosper if we are all a little more willing to offer the benefit of the doubt to those struggling, in the hope that someday someone will do the same for us if necessary. In the name of humanity.
