I am quite sure Kerrie O'Brien speaks for many Irish people, when she articulates how the sheer scale of the homelessness problem has desensitised a large swathe of the population.
Kerrie is an accomplished poet, a former winner of the RTÉ Arena Flash Fiction Competition, 2012, and the first poet to read as part of the New Writers Series in Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris. And it was her return from that city earlier this year that made her realise the depth of that desensitivity. She explained to Dave Fanning on The Ryan Tubridy Show.
“I spent a month in Paris in May. It’s only when I came home that I realised that we had become so desensitised to it. I get the LUAS into town. Even walking from Stephen’s Green to South William Street, encountering about 20 different people in doorways asking for money.”
But that was when she met another young woman, also called Kerrie, that she was really spurred to action. That other Kerrie was sitting on Grafton Street, reading a book, alone. Kerrie O'Brien asked her whether she had somewhere to stay that night, and she replied that she had her own tent and tries to sleep in hidden places. She also tried to avoid hostels, for fear of being robbed or attacked.
This was the final straw for Kerrie O'Brien. Realising that “Government is effectively ignoring this problem”, and she decided she would have to take action herself.
“I put a call out on social media just to say, does anybody want to do a gig, maybe a book, or something. The response was overwhelming. Literally, inundated, Twitter and Facebook. Straightaway, Pat Cotter, director the Munster Literature Centre, gave €500 towards a book. Now it’s kind of spiralled.”
Engaging with the Simon Community, Kerrie has since managed to pull together some of the cream of Irish literary talent into a book entitled, Looking at the Stars: An Anthology to Raise Money for the Homeless.
The book features prose, poetry and non-fiction from writers including Sebastian Barry, Anne Enright, Kevin Barry, Belinda McKeon, Joseph O'Connor, Benjamin Black, Sinead Gleeson, Paul Muldoon, Donal Ryan, Christine Dywer Hickey and Colin Barrett among others.
A total of 1,000 copies will be printed, selling for €15 each, with every sense of the €15,000 target going to the Rough Sleepers Programme of the Simon Community.
Kerrie is deeply concerned that this problem is not being taken anywhere near seriously enough by Government and, to a degree, understand how people have become desensitised to the personal tragedies of people sleeping rough, in particular. “You can talk to everyone”, she says. “You sit outside a cafe in Dublin, within 5 minutes, someone will come in asking for money.”
Initially, Kerrie feels, people might be more sympathetic but, after a while, they become a little less patient and just wave people away. That is what she wants to change.
“This can’t continue. People are dying on the streets. People are starving, it’s a horrific situation to be in…. Not one human being should be sleeping on the streets.”