Rough sleepers in doorways on a rainy night in Galway

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

On a torrentially wet night that had more in common with winter than summer, just after midnight they bedded down in doorways in a vain effort to find shelter from the rain.

And as the last of the evening’s revellers ran through the showers to a taxi to take them home, the ones with no home settled into a cold, wet doorway.

Along the length of Shop Street, there were fifteen people sleeping rough – and this was rough by any definition.

Without staring at their hardship, it would have seemed from their faces that most of them weren’t Irish – but they were here and they had nowhere to go.

Fifteen was just Shop Street’s total; if I’d walked around the corner to Market Street, I know there were more – as they were on St Augustine Street and dotted elsewhere around the city centre.

Last Saturday morning, making my way across Eyre Square just before 9am, there were upwards of a dozen people waking under dirty duvets sheltered by a hedge at the Meyrick Hotel end.

Given that the city was unusually busy on the day – the Lions were just kicking off a memorable 80 minutes in New Zealand – it was an arresting sight; not one we are used to, but one increasingly more frequent than heretofore.

COPE Galway reported 32 rough sleepers in the city on one night in the last fortnight – and they didn’t pick the worst example just to prove a point.

Those who know more suggest an influx from elsewhere in the country, steered west by authorities whose primary aim is to remove a problem from, literally, their own doorstep.

So, the first thing that is required is a coordinated, nationwide response – not a covert effort to push the problem from one side of the country to the other.

The reality is that there is a shortage of accommodation from homeless people across the country and quite understandably the bulk of the headlines go to those families who find themselves wedged into one hotel room through no fault of their own.

Many of the rough sleepers have issues with drink and drugs, topped off by a predilection for anti-social behaviour, to a point that the usual hostel accommodation isn’t suitable anyway, even if it were available.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.