Grand Canal tragedy will haunt FG on election trail

IF there’s one image that will haunt the outgoing Government for the rest of this election campaign, it’s that shot of Eoghan Murphy beaming down, from a poster, upon a white-suited forensic team picking through the tattered remnants of a rough sleeper’s tent below.

As the Taoiseach was launching his party’s campaign in Monaghan, news was breaking of a shocking freak accident beside the Grand Canal: a homeless man, asleep in his tent, was scooped up by the claw of an industrial vehicle clearing the canal bank’s squalid ‘tented village’. The man’s tent had collapsed and apparently looked empty as the clean-up team set to work. His screams alerted the workers and the man was rushed to hospital for surgery on ‘life-changing injuries’.

And the picture that told the whole story is one that will crop up, for years to come, in the worst nightmares of politicians and their campaign teams: a length of incident tape, keeping the public back from the scene of the horrific accident, is looped around the base of the lamppost bearing Eoghan Murphy’s poster. Literally, as well as figuratively, the Minister for Housing was tied in to this debacle.

Homelessness, in all its guises, was already shaping up to be the primary doorstep issue in the campaign. The shortage of social and affordable housing, the repossessions of family homes, and the rental crisis have all fused with the rough sleeping problem in the public eye: whether they are sleeping in tents by the canal, or feeding their children from cardboard sheets on city streets while waiting to return to their B&Bs, or sharing cramped facilities in family hubs, the most vulnerable people have clearly been failed by a modern, sophisticated European country with a thriving economy.

It hardly matters that the issues that drive people into tents on the damp, mucky banks of a canal are generally quite different from those that see families lose their homes and move into hotels and hubs. Mental health problems and addiction, itself a consequence of the unchecked rise of the feuding Narcos, are the reasons why desperate people feel safer in tents than in homeless shelters. There was uproar from homeless activists in 2017 when Dublin Regional Homeless Executive boss Eileen Gleeson dared suggest that some rough sleepers’ ‘bad behaviour’ had landed them on the streets. Yet it is clear that there are, indeed, some whose behaviour makes life impossible for others who just want a safe bed for the night, and which forces them to take their chances on the streets.

The reasons why families are losing their homes to vulture funds, why they can’t afford a mortgage or why rents are spiralling upwards, these are varied and complex and have little to do with drug abuse or mental health services. But they are all conflated under the ‘homelessness’ heading, and there’ll be little point in Government politicians trying to debate the distinctions and untangle the strands with angry and frustrated voters on the campaign trail over next few weeks: we’re a prosperous country with full employment, and yet people are struggling and suffering before our eyes.

COMING home earlier this week, I spotted the tail end of a sleeping bag peeking out of my garden shed: a homeless man had crept in, on one of the worst nights of the year, for shelter. My younger teenagers were worried and scared, but none of us wanted to put him out in the rain. It was the same night as the incident on the canal, a couple of miles away, and we reckoned he might have been one of the tent-dwellers whose pitiful lodgings had been swept away.

In the end, I rang the local Gardaí. They knew him well, as it turned out, he was a regular in the area, they knew his name and his troubled and violent history. For our safety’s sake, the garda said it’d be best to move him on, but he assured me there was a bed for him in a local refuge – if only he’d take it.

I don’t know if he did take it, or where he slept that wretched night. But I know that no human being should have been wandering the streets looking for a dry corner of a shed on a stormy January night in 2020, whatever his background or his troubles. So he is, in a way, a symbol of the problem that faces the outgoing Government as it seeks re-election: ‘homelessness’, in one of its many guises, has come to most folks’ doorsteps by now.

And it’s on the doorsteps that it will haunt Mr Varadkar and his team.