Homeless protest is a phoney stunt
IDENTIFY the S***s in the sobering experience of a young friend of mine, Andrew, who lost his political innocence last week. He left work just before 1pm on Friday the 23rd, the real Christmas Eve in Dublin, and made his way through the last-minute shoppers to Apollo House.
He was curious after the widespread publicity about the homeless protest and went to the gate of Apollo House, where a man with an earpiece stopped him and others from entering.
Inside the gate, a woman with a printed sheet of paper was checking off names while another security man in a high-viz vest looked on – back-up for her policing of what Andrew described as a VIP list.
My young friend was gobsmacked that a protest about such a grim issue as homelessness would be giftwrapped as a showbiz event with all the trimmings, including hams hanging out in the VIP area.
Some ‘celebrities’ clocked in at Apollo House and the publicity duly portrayed them as caring and compassionate. And by default, anyone in the public eye who wasn’t there risked being cast as uncaring.
Andrew assumed that Brendan Ogle and the water protesters who appeared to be in charge had a licence for celebrity tours of the homeless – and the franchise for indignation about homelessness. The celebrities were what leftists call ‘useful idiots’.
‘They were using homeless people as props for a political publicity stunt,’ he told me later,
My friend is 25, working in his first job after leaving college and supports charities for the homeless, like Fr Peter McVerry’s – but he can also spot someone trying to manipulate his social concerns for their own benefit.
On Wednesday I heard the chief executive of Dublin City Council explaining that some of the beds had gone unused in newly opened shelters for the homeless in Dublin. Owen Keegan also described the accommodation in Apollo House as sub-standard.
And there was no mention anywhere of three new shelters for the homeless in Dublin that opened when Apollo House and its ‘celebrities’ were in every news bulletin and newspaper.
Me? I am usually more convinced of a benefactor’s sincerity when their charitable donations and acts of kindness remain anonymous – and that means tax-exile billionaires as well as showbiz philanthropists.