All smoke and mirrors

I stepped over a body on the way into work this morning. It’s been a regular occurrence around here for a while now. In fact there are frequently two bodies, snoring away in the Hot Press doorway, wrapped in sleeping bags and enjoying – if that’s the right word – whatever mangled kip they can get, until well after the gang hits the office in the morning.

It’s a horrible feeling, being faced with the sight of them blocking the doorway. There is an inevitable instinct to waken them up and get them going on something that might in some way improve their situation. “Rise and shine,” my old man used to say to the reluctant teenagers in the house. “It’s a beautiful morning and there’s so much that you could be doing. It’s a lovely summer’s day. Enjoy it.” But anything that might smack of cheery bonhomie dies in the throat pretty quickly as the waft of sweat and dirt that almost inevitably attaches itself to street people hits you. And so, even though it makes you feel wooden and unresponsive, you step over them – as if they’re not there, almost.

It’s hard to tell what ages they are, but they’re in their twenties at the most. She might still be a teenager, but a somewhat haggard one, clearly suffering from the ravages of life on the street and whatever demons have driven her to this wretched spot by the side of the pavement – the cars and the trucks chugging by, sirens going off and people scuttling up the road, through their bedroom in effect, and presumably invading their dreams.

They disappeared a couple of weeks ago, as sometimes happens. And then she was back, but on her own. Maybe it’s just that the relationship is over. Or perhaps something bad has happened, like he OD’ed or picked up an infection and is out of circulation. Either way, it makes the morning scene that little bit sadder and more forlorn. The physical warmth that he gave her is gone. It may not be so bad now in the height of summer, but in the winter she’ll freeze all the more brutally if it goes on like this. You’d want to be a hard-hearted bastard not to feel for her, and for him. But then there are so many cases of a similar kind.

Just around the corner, opposite Andrews Lane Theatre, is a sheltered spot where a group of up to six or seven street people often gather at night. They lay their boxes down and create a kind of camp. They share whatever bottles have been picked up along the way and then eventually lay their heads down, in the almost hollow ground, as it were. They press together for warmth and maybe a little bit more, astonishingly oblivious to all that is going on around them. Sometimes the stench of booze and piss becomes overpowering and you have to speed up, going by, for fear of gagging. The squalor of it all is grim.

There are homeless people like these all over Dublin and no one in authority seems to give a shit. Of course that is a hard judgement on the dozens of good people who are working within the system and attempting to do their best in difficult circumstances, But the awful truth is that at the last count, the number was higher than ever before, a fact confirmed in Focus Ireland’s annual report, released last week. The report suggests that, at the moment, a staggering 140,000 men, women and children in Ireland – the vast majority of them in Dublin – don’t have a proper place to call home.

I recently took a look back over ‘Shaping The Future – Action Plan On Homelessness in Dublin 2001 – 2003’, a document which was published under the auspices of the Homeless Agency Board in the first year of the new millennium. It said all the things which you’d want a report of that kind to say – or almost all of them at any rate. And it contained the brave assertion that by the end of 2003, rough sleeping would be reduced by two-thirds. Well, far from achieving that objective, the general agreement is that the numbers on the streets have increased. Back then, the official figure for individuals sleeping rough was 200. Focus state that their outreach teams met 897 individuals on the streets over the course of 2002, and while the figures are not directly comparable, it’s clear that no real improvement has taken place.

Of those 897, almost 60% were under the age of 26. In other words, the stream of people slipping into living their lives on the street continues unabated. It is hardly surprising that a lot of them have drug problems. But then it is widely acknowledged that there are more heroin addicts in Dublin now, than ever before. The Department of Justice congratulates itself on having taken on the big time criminals. CAB makes a show of grabbing their assets. And nothing changes on the ground, except that the criminals get tougher (just like the laws), shooting anyone suspected of grassing them up to the pigs without the remotest compunction.

I took a wander along Dame St. the other night, up to and beyond Christchurch. I’ve always been sceptical about those newspaper stories that depict things as having gotten out of hand on the streets, but fuck it, I must have crossed paths with at least 50 junkies in that stretch. Two young middle-eastern lads were looking for their money back off a low-grade street hustler. Another guy was making a bolt across the street having just got a hold of something he didn’t seem to be entitled to. A teenager was slumped in a doorway, his eyes glassy and lost, his mind blasted clear out of reach. A posse of sinister and pinched looking gougers were abusing a couple of over-weight American tourists (Ireland – of 100,000 welcomes!). A trackie was being evicted from a pharmacy where he had been attempting to bully something from the staff, and he wasn’t going willingly. There may have been clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right – but when I looked straight ahead, I saw the ravages of heroin everywhere.

Homelessness and heroin – the problems are not one and the same, but they are connected, most specifically in the fact that far from getting to grips with the issues, the official approach has been thoroughly botched.

In the middle of reflecting on all that, it was announced today that Authorised Inspectors would be appointed by the Office Of Tobacco Control, to assist in the policing of the ban on smoking in pubs. Licenced premises where smoking was detected would be open to being charged. Now, I am in favour of anything that will help people to free themselves of the appalling effects of nicotine addiction. I loathe cigarettes. But this is like spending money on all of those stupid ramps and roundabouts and bollards and lights that have fucked up traffic in Dublin over the past few years with no discernible beneficial effect in terms of reducing road deaths. How many houses for the homeless would have been built for the money spent on those idiocies?

The smoking inspectorate offers more of the same, in the context of all that needs to be done, it is wanton stupidity. It is the official mind in Ireland at its most petty and prescriptive.

It is a crazy example of how to waste the public’s money on fucking band aids when radical surgery is needed elsewhere, and fast.