I’m in that place between the three libraries in college, by the purple booths. The person who agreed to meet with me, Richard Crotty, a PPES student in his final year, spots me and waves over and we sit down on seats in the place below the library complex. He has taken part in the College St. Vincent de Paul (VDP) Society’s Street Outreach programme since his first year, meeting other students every Monday from 7 pm to 9 pm to give out food, tea, coffee, clothes, and essentials to people sleeping rough around the city.
“I’d say 60% of what Street Outreach is is just talking and listening.” What means the most to the people Crotty meets is just “not being invisible, someone seeing them”.
“Actually, funny enough, one of the ladies I met on Street Outreach on Monday I was passing by on Wednesday and she recognised me and said hello…and I spoke to her for a little bit and she asked me a few different things…. and it was actually kind of nice, I don’t know how many relationships she has in life so it’s nice that we had that.”
The Street Outreach programme takes place every Monday and Wednesday from 7 pm to 9 pm. Volunteers are divided into two groups – one takes a Southside route, the other a Northside one. In each group there is an Activity Leader (AL) who “has done an extra bit of training” and can lead the charge in difficult situations. All volunteers must be Garda vetted and have attended a training session hosted by VDP. Anyone who meets these requirements is eligible to join.
You often meet fewer homeless people on the North side of the city than on the South side, Crotty tells me. This is possibly because the south is known as the “more affluent side” and there is greater footfall, or because people feel safer.
People have come to recognise the volunteers when they see them carrying the bags, and often Crotty is approached before approaching others. There was a man, “a quite weathered figure”, who walked up to Crotty. After chatting with him for a while, Crotty asked “do you have somewhere safe to stay tonight”? “I haven’t had somewhere safe to stay in 20 years”, the man replied.
“He had been homeless 20 years. To think anyone could survive 20 years living on the streets …that’s a crazy kind of prospect”.
Are most of the people that Crotty meets on their own? He pauses. “50/50…you’d be surprised how many people are with other people… the homeless community all know each other. You’d be sitting on Grafton Street and they go ‘oh how ye Jimmy’ or ‘how ye Bob’… and they’ll say ‘oh I’m chatting here tryna get me food, come back to me’. It’s weird, it’s like a community in a place where community shouldn’t exist, in a sense, but probably where community is needed the most”.
Crotty is often struck by how willing people are to talk to him about their experiences. “I especially feel that for men…the men particularly who are homeless, actually open up to you a lot more than you’d imagine…probably because they feel so invisible.”
“I’m known as the marathon-running homeless man,” one man told Crotty. “That’s what I do, I run marathons, that’s me name…I just love running but then I get me pins in me legs you know, and I’ll run to this place and I’ll run to that place, and I’ll just run everywhere.”
Crotty tells me that he meets a lot of people struggling with drug addiction. However, the narrative that most people living on the streets have ended up there due to drug use is wrong. “What I found very interesting was this correlation between drugs and homelessness…and that it isn’t linear…everyone always thinks ‘drugs’ then homelessness…..but I remember someone said to me “if you were homeless, you would take drugs too because the nights are so cold, it’s the only way I survive”.
“[Homelessness] is such a horrible existence that you need the drugs so to speak….and then the more you take the drugs, the more you need them, and then you lose a bit of yourself I think…they’re taking the hard stuff as well, they’re not taking the soft stuff…and then it just ruins all other aspects of your life, like you can imagine, so many have families that just aren’t in connection with them.” One man told Crotty, “My daughter knows me as the homeless guy that sleeps on Dawson Street”.
“A lot of the time you’ll meet someone and they have kids but their kids are completely disconnected from their lives”.
Crotty is often surprised by how open the people that he meets are about their drug use. To him, there seems to be a “certain level of acceptance” about it. One person that Crotty met had received a phone from a family member for Christmas. The plan was that they would meet up and the relative would help the person find a job and get back on their feet. One day though, the person returned to their tent to find that their partner had sold the phone for crack.
“In my head I’m like that’s the biggest betrayal, you’re given a lifeline and [your partner] has taken it away from you. But once again there’s this level of acceptance that oh people on crack addiction do this so that the person said this giving out about the partner but almost didn’t mean it.” It seemed that the person never believed that they could overcome their situation in the first place, “was never going to actually make something of it…so when the disappointment came, it wasn’t actually that palpable”.
During his second time doing Street Outreach, Crotty met a lady on Grafton Street, “and she was telling me this is her second night homeless…she was asking me if I thought this was a good place to stay…I later found out that she was pregnant”.
For Crotty, being involved in Street Outreach puts things into perspective. “I think like God you think you have it tough, that is tough”.
Last week, Crotty heard a story about a woman “contemplating committing suicide”. There’s a pause. How does he deal with that?
“You just listen more. You let them speak… and you try to chat them through it…..you just give them 20 minutes of your time…Then you can offer different social services they have contacts with.…one woman we did bring to the Mater hospital”.
As we talk, just beyond the campus walls, there is someone sitting on the corner between Nassau and Dawson Street holding a paper cup, watching people passing by. Does he ever find it difficult to connect with the people he meets?
“I always think it’s kind of funny…you always feel a little bit out of place, because you’re trying to emphasise, when in a sense, you’ve no real…you’ve no possibility of emphasising, because I don’t know what it’s like to be homeless, I’ve never been homeless, I have no real idea….so you try to connect over the more trivial things.
“Like, for instance, when you’re giving them a sandwich or something like that and they’re like ‘oh I don’t like vegetables’ and you’re like ‘yeah I HATE vegetables!’…or you give them a curly wurly and they’re like ‘nah I prefer the Freddo’ or something like that.
“I feel like if I was them, I would almost be resentful of me trying to emphasise – that’s what I think I would feel if I was in their situation – but because they’re so invisible to most people, us even giving them the time of day at all… is actually… they love it, they’ll even chat around…‘which one do you like’?….They don’t ask about your life, because you don’t want to tell them about your life…but they tell you about their life which is nice”.
What are the best aspects of doing Street Outreach? “I just feel like you know I’m here in this pompous university so to speak, and I was doing philosophy…I’m doing these kind of intangible grandiose things in the midday…and I think it’s nice to get a touch back with what reality is as well.”
“I think also….now I’m specialising in economics… it’s like seeing the humans beyond the spreadsheet…there are actually real human beings out there and that policy has real implications….and it’s nice to hear some human stories.
And then obviously it’s just helping people….I also love the interesting people you meet… I’m a people’s person, I love hearing their stories, I love chatting to people…and that’s what Street Outreach is.”
“I have had eggs chucked at me once”, Crotty admits, laughing. “But I’m the kind of weird person I kind of like that as well…I’m like oh it’s a story… it’s a bit of life you know, or something like that”.
What can we do, and what can the government do to help? Crotty thinks for a moment. “I don’t know, to be perfectly honest. I think the best thing to do is to keep doing what we do and do more of it…..I don’t know if [homelessness] can ever fully be eradicated, and I don’t know if resources spent on trying to eradicate it as a government would be the best use of those resources.
“I think better use of those resources would be rehab clinics, where a government could be involved there is helping them with the drugs first,” rather than focusing solely on getting the people who are struggling with addiction into accommodation.
During Street Outreach, does Crotty ever run into other volunteers from other organisations? He nods. “They do a massive soup run at the top of Grafton Street…and I often see other people going around with bags as well…I think Ireland is pretty good for that”.
A couple Crotty met recently told him that their tent had been ripped open in the night by the wind during Storm Éowyn. “The whole place was leaking. It was terrible. And someone had went in and stolen their sleeping bags”. The volunteers were able to contact the Simon Community to come and give the couple new sleeping bags “…which was nice and that resource is available”.
“Sometimes they’re overstretched though and actually that would be a great thing, if there was a drive to give Simon Community more sleeping bags, that’s definitely a really worthwhile thing….I know we’ve called them in the past and they say ‘we would but we just don’t have any, we have really high demand at the moment’”.
We end our conversation with a story which I have since found evidence of on YouTube. “I met this one guy and he’s like ‘I’m the homeless rapper…here man can you give me a light there’….and he’s literally smoking a J in front of us…and I’m like I don’t know what the policy is here, can I?!….and he’s like ‘ah fuck it I’ll do it meself’ …and he’s pulling up a video on his phone, and he’s on [a talkshow] and he did a rap….he’s like ‘I’m the homeless rapper’…and he’s trying to cover his joint and light it up at the same time…and then he rapped for us”.
Taken from a video on YouTube, rap lyrics written by Tommy KD, the ‘Homeless Rapper,’ are as follows:
“I wasn’t born an addict, I wasn’t born with a habit, but once I started I just had to have it,
Crack, smack, the buzz was good but I hate what the shit it does,
It messes you up, but when you get knocked down get back up and rip off the dust,
You must endeavour to do whatever it takes to get your head together and to get better”.
