Cork's homeless figures should shame us all

IT’S just before 6am on the second-last Friday in July, a bright morning and already warm. To the left of the ramp down to the Lapp’s Quay car park is a tent, across the way from the doorway where, in early December 2017, Kathleen O’Sullivan died.

Kathleen had a lot of troubles in her life, and the deck was stacked against her from the day she was born.

I met Kathleen a few times in the weeks before she died, and I knew her to chat to, a little. I first met her on a bitterly cold night in November, when she was sharing that doorway at the back of the Clayton with a young man — “Only for the security, mind,” she clarified to me, a complete stranger — and they were swaddled in sleeping bags and duvets.

I was writing a feature on the perennial cottage industry of well-meaning soup kitchens which spring up every winter. Kathleen told me she could never get over the death of her son Anthony. The loss had driven her to despair, to drink, and onto the streets. She also told me she had pleurisy and pneumonia.

Kathleen was a Traveller, and she told me that there is a meaning to things, that places have a power to them. Seven years earlier, her aunt had died in that same doorway and, she predicted, she would die there too.

I met Kathleen a week later, at a Christian soup kitchen on Patrick’s Street. She told me she had got a bed in CUH, and although she looked very ill, she was beaming. She said it would be a holiday. She looked older than her 44 years, but she had a smile that lit up her face.

That first night I met her, Kathleen told me: “I won’t survive another winter on the streets”. Three weeks later, she died in that doorway, just as her aunt had died before her.

On this bright morning in July, across from Kathleen’s second-last resting place, there is a battered old leather travelling bag, a valise, sitting on the pavement by the tent. I nudge it with my foot, and a roar comes from toward the river.

A man in his sixties, sporting a trilby hat and a mighty and nicotine-stained moustache, shouts at me that it’s his bag. When I introduce myself and explain that I wasn’t trying to rob him, he says there’s a woman sleeping in the tent, he doesn’t know her, but he likes to keep an eye to make sure she’s okay.

He says he’s been sleeping rough since he was asked to leave Cork Simon a few years ago.

“For drinking,” he says, adding with a shrug, “which is fair enough”.

On the boardwalk on Lapp’s Quay, two men lie, separately, sound asleep in sleeping bags.

Across the street, the doorway to Sherry Fitzgerald is empty. Last winter, when I accompanied the Cork Simon outreach team on their morning rounds, a young man slept there in the sort of symbolism you’d never get away with in fiction.

On Anglesea Street, around the corner from City Hall, it’s unusual these days that there is nobody sleeping outside the civic offices, but up the road, outside the Breast Check clinic, two men are asleep in sleeping bags.

On Patrick’s Street, there are men sleeping in various doorways, as there always are at this time of day. There’s one man outside Jack Jones, two outside Penney’s, and one outside the former Debenham’s. Two men are sleeping outside the Tourist Information Office, beneath layers of duvets, and by Father Mathew, a taxi idles, its driver eying me suspiciously.

Under the portico of St Patrick’s Church, two people sleep, while over on Kennedy Quay, with the sun glinting on the river from the east, a man and a woman doze perilously close to the water’s edge.

Some rough sleepers choose their spot based on whether they can or cannot be easily seen by the passers-by. Some people sleep in public places so they can be seen by passing gardaí, or picked up on CCTV.

Others become as invisible as possible because rough sleepers have, with depressing regularity, been assaulted; some have been beaten up and robbed, some have been urinated and defecated upon, some have been set alight, and some, like the late Timmy Hourihane in 2019, have been murdered.

Some sleep outside Penneys, which is about as public as it gets, but more people sleep rough hidden from public view than do in the doorways of Pana.

Outside a disused premises in Wilton, behind a duck-blind of overgrown weeds, you would probably never see the homeless man who lives in a tent there, and who delights at his own invisibility.

In one of Cork’s leafiest suburbs, a woman lives behind shrubbery. You’d pass her home every day and never know a human being lived there. On the other hand, you might have spotted the man who lives with his dog under a tarpaulin by a popular walk on the outskirts of town. You might not, too. They keep to themselves.

There’s a man over in Ballincollig who sleeps in his car. Every morning he goes to work on a construction site, building homes for other people.

Navigating around town this early morning, I eventually count 21 people sleeping rough. A month ago I saw 32, and weeks before that Cork Simon’s outreach team met 52 people one morning.

The numbers sleeping on the streets are down at the moment, but the Cork Simon shelter on Anderson’s Quay is creaking at the seams, with 73 people sleeping there every night. A year ago that was 58 people. St Vincent’s hostel houses approximately 70 people every night.

What is perhaps a more concerning statistic is that from January to June of this year, Cork Simon has had 121 new presentations of people sleeping rough, or an average of four new people every week.

While rough sleeping is only at the most visible end of the homelessness spectrum, the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, and the rental market crisis have all conspired to create the perfect storm.

That four new people are forced to sleep on Cork’s streets every week should shame us all.

When he was a young man, writing for Saturday Night Live and in constant fear of being fired, comedian Larry David would walk around New York evaluating doorways. 

“That’ll be a good spot for me when I’m homeless,” he would think.

Sometimes, perhaps, we could all do a lot worse than to think a little like Larry David now and then.