Beauty, bustle and cruelty on streets of Paris
THERE was controversy in France last March when an old story was given a Gallic twist. The news broke that authorities were encouraging homeless people to leave Paris and seek refuge in reception centres set up in other regions.
There they would be housed for three weeks, before being filtered into local support services, but the aim was to get them out of Paris.
The reason? It would free up around 5,000 hotel beds that could then be sold at an extortionate price to rugby fans, rather than used for emergency accommodation.
We’ve heard this tale before, with pitiful stories of homeless people being moved off the streets of cities hosting the Olympics an old trope by now.
It was given a repulsive refresh in Sochi before the Russian city hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014, when a plan to slaughter up to 2,000 stray dogs was leaked to the media.
This, again, is an old, lamentable tactic in efforts to present a pristine stage for a global audience.
It’s no coincidence that Paris is hosting the Olympics next summer, with much of the operation around this World Cup a tune-up for that.
The language around housing here has plenty of echoes familiar to anyone tuned in to our own dismal domestic situation, but whatever cruel ambitions authorities may have had about emptying the streets, it hasn’t worked.
Homelessness is a wicked feature of every urban area on the planet, but it has never seemed as noticeable to this visitor on many previous visits to the city.
It is an especially poignant social curse in a society so committed to providing safety nets; since 2007, the right to housing is a legal entitlement in France.
The lived reality of thousands is markedly different.
Place de la Republique is the famous square celebrating the First, Second and Third Republics, with an enormous statute at its centre of Marianne, the personification of France.
The long streets that surround it are busy 24 hours a day, with tourists, residents and revellers. The kerb-side bars and restaurants have heaved with Irish supporters in recent times, and from Friday afternoon green jerseys were flecked among them, too.
But along these streets, too, lie stretched dozens of homeless people. It has been exceptionally mild here, but from the start of next week, temperatures are expected to drop sharply.
Your correspondent was walking through Place de la Republique early last Sunday morning, only hours after the match against Scotland had finished.
There was an early flight back to Dublin to catch, but the place was still buzzing with revellers trying to drain the last from the night.
Among their number were Irish fans, caught between the jubilation of the Stade de France and the reckoning that would come with morning.
A couple sat slumped on the ground, their race run.
But they would be fine the next day, perhaps a little embarrassed by the consequences of their success, but with an anecdote that would soon be drawing laughs.
The same goes for the images pinging around WhatsApp groups of other Irish supporters strewn on French streets, living examples of the price of success.
They woke up, and sobered up, and found their way back to places of comfort.
Street living offers no respite. To those trying to find a couple of hours of peace amid the din of weekend excitement, there is no World Cup.
The Stade de France may as well be situated on the far side of the moon.
For many of these people, it’s enough that there will be tomorrow, with all the heartache that brings.
The problem is not obviously more severe than what visitors to Dublin will see on a given day, and an Irish tourist with a modicum of understanding will know our homegrown problems have long since spiralled into crisis.
But it has felt more and more jarring here, as the swell of fans grow, to see people passed out on the pavements.
All of life is here, in its beauty, and its bustle, its excess and its cruelty.