GAA stars step forward to tackle the big issue
A group of GAA players slept out last week to highlight the homeless crisis. Philip Lanigan joined them at Dublin’s GPO
SHE looks just like an early-evening reveller, dressed to impress for a night on the tiles in Dublin. Turning heads amidst the hustle and bustle outside the GPO where a hive of activity surrounds the Gaelic Voices For Change gathering.
Except she’s not heading out downtown with a bulging wallet.
Her mam told her to drop over from her emergency accommodation in Dublin city centre because she’d heard a group of players were staging a sleep-out on the main drag of O’Connell Street in solidarity with the homeless. The nine’clock news on RTÉ had just screened an item, so here she is.
More than a statistic. A face to the 8,000 and more currently experiencing homelessness.
She speaks of her own personal family trauma that brought her to this point.
Of the shared solitude of her own situation. Of wishing for her own room and a bit of privacy. Of being well down the waiting list for housing because she’s on her own and the crisis involving families is naturally top of that list – Ireland now with the highest rate of child homelessness in Europe with over 3,000 children affected.
Of not feeling in great health of late so she doesn’t feel up to the soup or bread roll on offer. Apologises for talking at a rate of knots and is gone again, leaving a group of current and former inter-county players to bed down for the evening under the iconic pillars of the GPO and amidst the noisy cityscape.
But let’s rewind to the start.
It’s 6pm on a Saturday evening in Dublin city centre and there’s a familiar festive hustle and bustle on the streets, passing shoppers unsure of what to make of the barricades being lined up around the front of the GPO and line of faces donning high-vis jackets with Gaelic Voices For Change on the back.
An idea has brought them here: that inter-county players could stand together outside of their intercounty bubble and shine a light on an important societal issue. Not to make any grand claims or to try and solve anything, just be a voice for positive change.
Dublin hurling manager Pat Gilroy and his squad of county hurlers are there; so too David Herity and his camogie squad along with the ladies football team and a collection of past players such as Vinny Murphy, Charlie Redmond, Johnny Magee and Kevin Nolan. One of the organising committee, Alan O’Mara, heads up a Cavan delegation that includes Raymond Galligan and Dara McVeety; Kevin Cassidy has made it down from Donegal.
In various other locations, versions of the same are taking place, from Limerick to Belfast, from Wexford to Sligo. Around 400 former and current inter-county players answered the call. Ciaran ‘Nudie’ Hughes gathered bodies together in Times Square in New York. Boston was another venue. One person made his own solidarity stand in Quebec, in Canada.
On O’Connell Street, first Wild Youth and then Róisín Ó draw attention to the cause by performing a few songs under the famous pillars before homeless activist, Trinity College student and mother-of-one Erica Fleming takes to the mic and delivers a coruscating reminder of why those present are gathered, of the day-to-day reality for those without a home.
‘Being homeless feels like you are totally alone. That you are forgotten about by society. That you do not matter. That this is somehow your fault. Anxiety is your best friend. Fear starts to consume you. All of a sudden you start to believe there is no hope. However, I believe there is hope. The more people who ask questions and demand answers can change what is happening here in Ireland. I believe my child can and will have a bright future.’
Long-time campaigner Fr Peter McVerry bemoaned the lack of an integrated government plan and issued a stirring rallying call. ‘It should be made illegal to evict people onto the streets. That’s what we did during the Famine. We evicted families on to the streets because they could not afford to pay the rent. We’re still doing that today in the 14th wealthiest country in the world.
‘In a country with the fastest growing economy in the EU, we’re still putting families on to the street because they cannot afford to pay the rent.
‘It is absolutely disgraceful. It is absolutely immoral. It should be made illegal.
‘What I would like is that the GAA adds its voice to the call for a National Housing and Homeless Emergency.’
Truth to power from a man who exudes the studied wisdom of a person of faith and speaks with the courage of a modern seer.
Here he is, recognising the power of the GAA to go beyond the whitewash and affect social change in a more public manner.
Eamon Fennell and Anna Geary remind those present why they are there, that it’s not really about them at all. And off the players go, in different groups to different streets, donation buckets in hand.
Temple Bar on a Saturday night, sober, is an experience, the streets hopping with riotous energy.
A Scottish accent asks what the Gaelic Voices For Change thing is all about. Living in Ireland for a number of years, he comes to life when he hears the GAA is involved. ‘Sure they’re like the Freemasons!’ he laughs. ‘The Illuminati!’ referencing the powerful, secret society made famous by The Da Vinci Code.
And drops €20 in the bucket.
The reaction to those collecting money is hugely positive and giving, the name of Fr Peter McVerry on the front of the bucket helping in that regard. Someone posts how in Belfast, a taxi driver stops and donates €500 to the group there.
Back in Temple Bar, the biggest crowd is gathered around one entrepreneur who is offering €100 to anyone who can hang from his bar-like contraption for 100 seconds. Charging €10 a pop, he’s already in profit by the time the group moves to the calm of Grafton Street, where it’s like stepping from a rock gig to an open air classical concert.
Ironically, it’s here, on the most expensive shop frontage in the city, that the homeless situation is most stark, bodies filling doorways.
When the group returns to bed down in sleeping bags at the GPO, it’s hard to shake the feeling of faking it, especially on a mild winter’s evening where there is safety in numbers and a barricade offering a further protective cocoon.
Yet the whole initiative is about lending a bit of true perspective.
Con O’Callaghan – the hottest property in Gaelic games right now – is curled up in a ball just metres away on a night when twitter is overheating on his behalf over not even making the list for RTÉ Sportsperson of the Year, James McClean getting the public vote instead.
Dublin ladies footballer Sinéad Finnegan meets a girl who used to play football for Dublin. Who suffered the loss of both her parents at just 18 years old and has been living on the streets for last three years.
Mayo’s David Brady is there after his own experience the week after this year’s All-Ireland final. Walking up Westmoreland Street in the early hours of the morning, he was
A girl who used to play for Dublin... living on the streets for three years
greeted with shouts of ‘Good man Brady’ and ‘Up Mayo’ from across the street. ‘I stopped, turned back, hesitating slightly,’ he recalled. ‘I could see that the person was homeless but not soulless. A man I never met before but for whatever reasons has ended up with less than he started out with in life, without a roof over his head.
‘I was heading for a coffee and asked did he want to join me. Our chat wasn’t all about the why he had to spent nights sleeping under the stars and streetlights, neither differing in their dull glow of his life’s fortunes. Our chat wasn’t all about the “How” did you become homeless. We chatted GAA and the price of coffee! We parted agreeing that next year was defiantly to be Mayo’s year.’
That’s who he had in mind as the night unfolded. What made him get involved.
‘Not to change or expect to eradicate homelessness’ but because ‘It’s about all the percentages making a difference to highlight the need for action and show solidarity… it’s our one per cent.’
Who knew a piece of cardboard could hold such value? Any attempt at sleep is dependent on having some down as a floor covering as the sleepout stretches into the witching hours.
There’s little escape for Rory O’Connor who seems to be a landmark for any late night revellers – versions of ‘Ah Jaysus, it’s Rory’s Stories!’ ringing out at regular intervals. The Outreach van that pulls up and offers tea and sandwiches is just one example of those providing a valuable service on the streets every night, even supplying fresh sleeping bags to the three homeless men who have joined the fringe of the group.
It’s only at around 5am that a calm settles on the streets.
For all its good intentions, how far removed the sleepout is from reality is revealed when everyone packs up at 6am to go home, leaving the three men behind on the ground, just as rainclouds gather overhead. On Monday, the Peter McVerry Trust turned the sod on a new €1.4m social housing development at Coldwinters, Fingal. On Tuesday night, in an RTÉ studio, McVerry himself would reiterate his call for a National Emergency after the screening of the powerful day-inthe-life homeless documentary The Big Picture, which detailed the disparate lives entangled in the crisis.
By then, Gaelic Voices For Change had raised over €200,000, all monies going towards homeless charities north and south including the Peter McVerry Trust, the Simon Community, Cope Galway, Thomond House and Novas in Limerick, and the Welcome Organisation in Belfast.
As to where the movement goes from here?
‘We’ll meet together in early January and plot the next steps,’ explains former Wexford hurler Diarmuid Lyng, one of those driving the movement. ‘It’s definitely lit a fire in enough people that I see them actively engaged on this issue.’
A starting point, not an end.