A Girl Alone

think. She must need it.

It's heartbreaking to see this kid, frozen and vulnerable, out on the streets every night, facing the harshest slings and arrows that the elements can throw at her, on her own and without any apparent support whatsoever. Sometimes she lands in a different doorway, and occasionally you'll see her bedded down under the one blanket with another, male citizen of the streets. It keeps them both a little warmer, I suppose.
People step over her on the way into hotpress, but she isn't ignored. Staff buy her cups of coffee and occasionally bring her stuff to eat. The way she tells it, she and her mother were both evicted from their home, some time ago. Her mother was taken into a hostel. "But I was too young to be let in," she told us. And so she ended up in the only other accommodation available to someone of no resources: a cardboard box.
Without wanting to interfere too much, efforts were made to see if there was any agency that might be of assistance to her. The one we were directed towards only opened at 10.30 she made agreements to head down there, accompanied by one of our staff, but it was difficult to make it happen. It was as if some distorted preservation instinct took over. She wouldn't be there the next morning. Or if she was, she'd inevitably be gone by the 10.30 deadline.
She seems bright and alert and capable of being helped. On the face of it she doesn't seem to be using drugs or drinking to excess, if at all. The right kind of intervention now and there seems to be little doubt that this young girl could have a decent and potentially fulfilling life ahead of her. Neglected, there's even less doubt but that dependence on drugs and alcohol will follow, as inevitably as night for most people at any rate follows day.
In so far as we can tell, neglect has been her lot to date. She hasn't been around for the past week or so, but the agency we spoke to don't seem to have achieved anything yet, in terms of helping her. Given her particular vulnerability, this seems scandalous. In the first place, it shouldn't be down to people like the staff of hotpress to put the effort in, to help a kid in this kind of plight. And in the second, there is a real sense in which the official response seems entirely inadequate.
Of course hers isn't an isolated case. Throughout the centre of Dublin, at four in the morning, doorways are strewn with bodies. Some of the people who live on the streets do so in the most appalling of circumstances: there are others who crash out close to the hotpress offices, slumping down in their own piss and shit, and, when they are awake, mauling one another and fighting pathetically, their faces scarred from years of living on the bottom of the bottom rung, enduring lives of grim degradation and, almost inevitably, deep and genuine despair.
It's true that there are things about our recent economic success, in relation to which Irish people in general have a right to feel pleased. But, in the end, there is nothing more sickening than hearing government ministers and establishment economists blathering on about the success of the Celtic Tiger when we have so singularly failed to tackle the real and glaring social problems that are both a cause and a function of the still massive poverty that exists all over Ireland.
It is a measure of the civilisation of any society how it takes care of, or provides essential assistance to, those who are most marginalised and vulnerable. In many ways, despite our economic boom, we have failed this test miserably, over the past few years. In the chronic under-funding of our health services and the terrible pressures that imposes on ordinary people; in our mean-spirited and frequently racist response to refugees; in our miserly attitude to old-age pensions and so on. But nowhere is our failure more graphically evident than in the shocking extent of the homelessness in Dublin in particular, and in the pitifully inept response of the authorities to what amounts to a national crisis.
There is a young girl who has taken to sleeping in the doorway of the hotpress offices in Trinity St. She, and hundreds like her, need help.