Friel donation a reminder of how little life has changed

THE Peter McVerry Trust coffers swelled by almost €200,000 this week thanks to the generosity of Anne Friel, wife of the late playwright Brian.

She donated the couple’s collection of Irish art to the homeless charity with work by Sean McSweeney, Phelim Egan and Norah McGuinness going under the hammer.

In her footnote to the auction catalogue Pat Hume, a family friend and the wife of SDLP founder John Hume, said Brian’s father, a councillor on the old Derry corporation, was passionate about the scourge of homelessness in his day.

‘No doubt, this filtered through to the young Brian, who became an active member of the first Derry committee to help the Travelling community in the 1960s,’ she wrote.

Perhaps Pat forgot to add how, as a young man, Friel went to London to search for his two maiden aunts and found them destitute and living on the streets. Just before WWII the women had suddenly left the family home in Glenties, Co. Donegal and never returned.

Their tragic fate inspired Dancing at Lughnasa and the two Mundy sisters who succumb to alcoholism out of loneliness in London, and die there in poverty.

It was not uncommon for generations of Irish emigrants to slip through the cracks into homelessness, just like immigrants from Eastern Europe can today.

But it beggars belief, if you excuse the pun, that for all the poverty and hardship that characterised Irish life as Brian Friel came of age, that homelessness is more prevalent today than ever.