I saw a guy humping in the street the other day. Sadly, there was nothing remotely erotic about the experience. Far from it. It was just another deeply tawdry and shameful scene from the gutter that seems to typify the city of Dublin and what has been happening here over the past few years with the rise in homelessnes.
I have no axe to grind with the individuals involved. On the contrary. If I was in their position, I’d like to think I’d still have enough spirit to get it on, if and when the opportunity arose, whether someone was looking or not. What was I to them? They were just doing what comes naturally – and they didn’t have a better place to do it than the street. But it was little short of mind-boggling all the same, the animal ferocity of it while customers were finishing their lunch in the restaurant next door.
It happened in broad daylight. I recognised the guy on top as one of the homeless characters who hangs around the lane that runs from Exchequer Strteet to Trinity Street, close to the hotpress offices. He’s a handsome if ravaged fellow, who is generally pleasant and seems to be capable of holding an intelligent conversation. He may well be a robber in his spare time and loathed as such by the shops he turns up in, trying to cobble together whatever bit of sustenance he can muster. He is certainly a heroin addict.
In fact I don’t have a clue as to the gender of the person he was fucking. All I saw was a pair of boots, motionless, covering the feet of an apparently still body underneath him. Banging away with poignant gusto, he might have been fucking his boyfriend up the arse. More likely, he was hammering one of the young girl addicts who have become an increasingly prominent feature of the heroin scene in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland in recent years. But there was so little movement or response underneath that for an appalled moment it struck me that I might have been witnessing an act of necrophilia. I shuddered and passed on by. They have enough shit to deal with, without someone like me wrecking their buzz.
From the fact that there was no sign of a body later, and no story in the papers the following day about a corpse being found in the vicinity, I took it that there had been no foul play. Small mercy. They must both have scrambled back to some kind of vertical position because by 8 o’clock, when I was heading for home, they were gone – presumably about the business of hustling in some shape or form, trying to get the next fix together most likely. I doubt that they were off to the premiere of Breakfast On Pluto.
The enthusiastic humping may have been a first, but the rest of the scene was horribly familiar. There are people sleeping in doorways all over the centre of the city at the moment. They pull together bits of cardboard boxes as beds and use the remnants of sleeping bags or stinking blankets to cover themselves. Some of them kip on the hard, cold pavement. There’s one regular that lies down on Molesworth Street, within 50 metres of the Dail itself, erecting a cardboard wall to keep the wind from freezing his arse off entirely. I can’t imagine that it provides any kind of meaningful shelter but so far he has stayed alive.
Some of the guys you see on the streets are reasonably clean, making the effort necessary to stay in quarter-decent shape. It must be hard going. I watched one morning while a bunch of them shared a bottle of still Ballygowan to wash their faces. I presumed it was stolen, because they could hardly have had the loot to buy it. One of the crew was sufficiently organised to have a towel to dry himself and that was shared around too. More often, however, the street people, even the clean ones, stink of piss and vomit. It is impossible to avoid a sense that they desperately need some kind of intervention – and, in the second week of the month of January, they need it now. With the cold nights of mid-winter closing in, some of those unfortunates who are living on the pavement will surely die of exposure. And yet, there is no evidence that anyone in government, or in the city council cares, to even the remotest degree, about what horrible fate might befall them.
I cannot understand the complete absence of any concerted attempt to deal with a situation where people are so obviously in imminent danger. I heard Fr.Peter McVerry talking about the issue on the radio last week. He has worked at the coal-face with marginalised young people in the inner city areas of Dublin for years. He expressed the view that it would be possible to solve the problem of homelessness in the city with relative ease, if the political will existed. But, he insisted, it doesn’t. Which is why people are left to flounder hopelessly in the margins, almost like a class of living dead in our midst. It is utterly shameful that we allow this to persist. On the basis of what I have seen on the streets around us here in hotpress, it would be impossible to disagree.
There is, it seems, a deep-seated complacency at official level. People wring their hands – and then do nothing. The truth is that solving the problem doesn’t require the application of rocket science. Yes, it would involve a commitment of resources. Yes, it would mean finding and employing people who have a vocational commitment to the campaign to help homeless people off the streets and into safe and secure accommodation. Yes, it would need proper follow through and support structures, to help to lift those who have been living on the streets out of the cycle of dependency on drink and drugs that so often has been instrumental in plunging them to rock bottom.
Yes, there is in this more than an element of the do-goodery that is so despised in the modern era required here.
But there is nothing mysterious or arcane involved. It isn’t as if we are waiting on the invention of a new medicine that might be a cure-all. Rather, it is about values and priorities. The people who eke out a chronic existence on the margins, the drug addicts, winos and psychiatrically ill, are at the bottom of the totem pole. In the Ireland of 2006, where the new official dominant ethos is that you put up or shut up, the attitude of those in power is that they can fuck off and die.
I’d like to believe otherwise, but until somebody shows me the plan, there is no reason to. No reason at all.b