Twenty-four hours on the streets

When in a good mood, Keith Harrington and David Kenny call themselves the 'happiest, luckiest homeless people you
will ever meet'. RÓISÍN INGLEspent a day and night in their company to find out for herself

THERE IS a dingy doorway at Busáras in Dublin that Keith Harrington and David Kenny, who are friends, know as the Bar. This morning Harrington is hunkered down in one corner sipping a can of Druids cider. On the pavement beside him is a pool of vomit flecked with blood. “It happens most mornings,” he says. “It’s the drink and the streets.”

He won’t go to hospital. Doesn’t like doctors. The last time he was in voluntarily for treatment was after an attack three years ago while he slept near Connolly Station. He got a kick in one side of the face and a bottle slammed in the other. His jaw is still wired, he says, parting his lips to display a mouth full of silver. “I was supposed to get it taken out, but . . .” He trails off.

“Listen, he’s been way worse than this,” says Kenny. “Wait until he necks a few cans: he will be like Fred Astaire. I know what I am looking at, girl: I am looking at myself 24 years ago.” Kenny is 46. Harrington is 24. “But I feel like 54 to be honest,” he says.

Kenny just got his weekly benefit payment. The pair have been pooling their resources since meeting, a few months ago. “Do you honestly think he is going to go to the Mater for treatment when we have money and cans? I wouldn’t. Well, I might now, but I wouldn’t have when I was his age,” says Kenny.

When they are in a good mood Harrington and Kenny call themselves the “happiest, luckiest homeless people you will ever meet”. People who pass by look down on them, take pity on them, says Kenny. “But we feel sorry for those people, with their mortgages and their jobs. We are free. We have worries, but they are different kinds of worries. I mean, what’s a normal life? I don’t know what that is. Who knows what problems that Luas driver goes home to?” he says, as a passing tram offers a cheery ding-ding-ding.

Since they met they have formed a sort of homeless alliance. What’s the plan today? “We don’t make plans. It’s all about time and place. The first time we ever met we were standing on the street watching the Indian buskers. Keith turned to me and said, ‘They’re great, aren’t they?’ And I said yes,” Kenny says. “We’ve been together ever since,” says Harrington, putting on a sappy face.

Sometimes they are allowed to sleep in Store Street Garda station. The night before they slept in a lift at Connolly Station. “We are not gay or anything, but lovely and warm it was,” says Harrington.

We met for the first time a couple of days earlier at the Capuchin Day Centre on Bow Street. This morning at the Bar, having checked I didn’t come with “back-up”, they agree to let me follow them around for 24 hours. “If you want to write it you should live it,” Kenny says in his low growl. “You will be more than welcome to sleep out with us, and you will be more than safe.”

Wednesday, 9.15am

We’re at the Capuchin centre, where up to 500 breakfasts and 500 dinners are served free every day. “I’d be lost without this place,” says Harrington. “It’s somewhere to keep out of the cold and meet people.”

The numbers using the service have doubled in the past 18 months, according to Br Kevin Crowley, who runs the centre. He expects numbers to increase. The last count, in November, of the numbers sleeping rough in Dublin was 70 people. At Fáilte, the day centre run by Merchant’s Quay Project, anything up to 100 people are waiting outside from early morning; most of them, staff estimate, are sleeping rough or in emergency housing.

“We might not have homes but we have the best plasma screen in the world: it’s called O’Connell Street,” says Kenny. “The stuff that happens there you wouldn’t see in any movie.”

He comes from Carlow, and that’s what people call him. “Howiya, Carlow.” “Have you got a smoke, Carlow?” He became homeless three years ago, when his house burned down. In the boom years he drove construction machinery. “I will work again. I’ve 20 good working years left in me,” he says.

There have been spells in prison and years of heroin addiction in between. He came to Dublin last September. Most weeks he pays for a hostel, even though he doesn’t always stay there, because he is trying to qualify for rent allowance so he can get his own place. On the nights he is not in the hostel he stays with Harrington on the streets.

As well as a fear of doctors, Harrington has an aversion to hostels. “You have to sleep with your runners under your head. You get robbed blind. Too many junkies or drug users or whatever you want to call them,” he says. Today at the centre free bags of groceries are given out. Kenny and Harrington generally give theirs away to people they say are more needy.

10.15am

We make our way towards Smithfield Square. Kenny produces a toothbrush from an inside pocket and brushes his teeth with bottled water and salt. “This is not a coat; it’s a home,” he says, spitting out the salt water.

I walk ahead. They had told me to wear old jeans and a waterproof jacket. “Fair play to her: she actually looks homeless,” Harrington says.

10.27am

The off-licence in the supermarket opens at 10.30am. “They better let us in,” says Harrington as we head to the supermarket. “I don’t care if it’s only three minutes to half past.” Harrington started drinking at the age of five. “I was taking capfuls of whiskey and then watering it down like I’d seen my da do,” he says. His parents were separated. At 13 he jumped out of a two-storey window and ran away to his mother’s home in Clondalkin. The doctors said he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It wasn’t called ADHD; it was called being a kid,” is Kenny’s opinion.

Harrington gave up drink for a couple of years when he was 19. “I went back on it on my 21st birthday, and it’s been downhill since then.” He’s not allowed near Clondalkin now, because of a barring order. “I don’t see my ma much any more. I don’t want her to have the stress of knowing what’s going on with me; she’s the most important woman in my life.”

They buy cans of Druids and head over to a doorway they call their Lounge.

“They can’t arrest us while we are in a private doorway,” says Kenny. Harrington produces the bag of butts they have scavenged. “It’s a cheap way of smoking, but it’s a cigarette; when you have nothing they go a long way.”

Harrington says he is “dying sick” without a drink. “It’s this throwing up blood I don’t like. I was very bad this morning; maybe it’s a burst ulcer. Food goes down, but it comes back up most of the time,” he says. “I’ll go to the funeral,” Kenny deadpans.

11am

Their friend Blondie arrives at the Lounge. Blondie is an elegant 53-year-old with whom David shared a home in Carlow before the fire. They spent years together, but now that they are both homeless they are no longer in a relationship. “She will always be precious to me,” says Kenny.

Blondie, who once owned a hairdressing business, now lives in a nearby hostel that costs €30 a week. The women’s hostel has a strong Catholic ethos. Rosary at teatime, Mass in the morning. “You bite your tongue and you fall into line and you learn to put your pride in your pocket,” she says. “I’ve been an independent person all my life, and being an inmate, having to account for yourself, it takes some getting used to.”

She drinks vodka a couple of times a week. “It numbs the pain,” she says. She goes to buy a bottle, and when she comes back Kenny starts a sing-song. “We must be two of the happiest homeless people in Dublin,” Harrington says. But when I ask him does he get depressed he says, “All the time . . . You can’t go to the toilet anywhere except laneways; you are looked at as though you are filth. It’s discrimination. I don’t think wanting to wash your face and hands after sleeping out all night is too much to ask, but nobody lets you in.”

Noon

At a bank on Capel Street Kenny is collecting his benefit money. Harrington is leaning on a leaflet holder. “That’s not for leaning on,” a security guard tells him sharply. I am leaning on another one, but nothing is said to me.

Kenny gets his money, and we head to another off-licence for more cans.

2pm

Kenny and Harrington have things to do. I go for coffee with Blondie. She tells me it’s important to keep up an illusion of respectability. Her hair is neatly put up with coloured clips. She washes and irons her clothes every day. “I’m lucky I have an iron,” she says. “I put my mornings in that way; it passes the time. After that I walk all over the city. It’s good therapy.” We talk about the books she is reading. She recommends My Friend Leonard by James Frey.

4pm

Blondie has gone back to her hostel. Kenny and Harrington are begging at the Busáras Luas stop. “Tapping,” they say, correcting me. There’s a new law against it, but a garda told Kenny that as long as they are not intimidating and don’t do it beside ATM machines “they can’t touch us”. They tap people getting tickets. They are given money by most people they ask. “We’d prefer to be told no than be ignored altogether,” says Harrington. “We’d often do a 12-hour shift,” says Kenny. “The day I can’t make a tenner from the top of Grafton Street to Abbey Street I will throw my hat at it.”

5pm

At the Focus Ireland cafe in Temple Bar Harrington munches on plate after plate of egg-and-ham sandwiches and two bowls of mushroom soup. Kenny barely eats. They are both getting tetchy. A loud row starts between them about whether we should put our names down to watch a movie called Hancock in the cafe at 6.30pm. When they start rowing, said Blondie earlier, they are like a couple of old women. We put our names down for the movie.

6.30pm

It’s going to be a cold one, they say. I go home for extra sleeping bags. They go for more cans and to visit a friend in the Mater hospital. “We have our moments, but I f***ing love him,” Kenny tells me. Hancock is not going to happen.

8.30pm

We meet back in town. Dinner is at McDonald’s on O’Connell Street. Harrington is delighted to be let in. He is usually barred. He orders off the Eurosaver menu. Cheese bites and chicken nuggets. Kenny tells me to get a seat upstairs. “They can’t go up there,” the security guard tells me. We sit downstairs and eat.

10pm

We walk back down to the Bar at Busáras. What’s the plan? “I told you, time and place, we don’t make plans,” says Kenny. His speech is slower now. He got a whack with a lump hammer a couple of years ago; it caused a stroke. The rest of the night is spent walking up and down Talbot Street, Henry Street, O’Connell Street, Abbey Street. Harrington and Kenny snipe endlessly at each other. The boredom is intense. They buy more cans. Every so often I suggest finding a place to sleep, but it’s way too early. I’ve been yawning since 9pm. “We don’t sleep until it’s quiet and we are dropping off,” says Harrington.

1.30am

Sitting on the pavement near Abrakebabra, we tune into the O’Connell Street plasma screen. A man outside the GPO waits for the night bus that brings people to hostels around the city. A heroin addict slumps behind the gates of a bank and covers himself with a sleeping bag. Kenny is sitting up and snoring with a can in his hand. “That’s it,” says Harrington. “We are going to find a place.”

We lug reams of thick cardboard from outside the Ann Summers shop and carry it down North Earl Street and then Talbot Street. We are sleeping on Amiens Street, across from Connolly Station, at the top of a long wheelchair ramp outside an office block. Harrington measures out the cardboard, decides where we will all sleep and makes me a cardboard pillow.

2.30am

Keith puts on the new jumper given to him by a soup run that stopped by Busáras earlier. “Smell that,” he says. “I love that fresh smell.”

3am

I drift off to sleep to the sound of Kenny and Harrington bickering about lighters and tobacco and cans and I don’t know what else.

3.30am

Harrington and Kenny are fast asleep. I am not. The cars and trucks never stop. The concrete underneath, even with all of our cardboard, is too hard. And it’s bloody freezing. I envy the two men their bellyfuls of cheap, medicating cider. I can feel the frost biting at my cheeks. I am so tired I could probably sleep through the cold and discomfort if it wasn’t for Kenny’ssnores and the fact that I am quietly terrified.

Of what? Not of Harrington or Kenny. They are the last two people in Dublin who would scare me now. The only thing stopping me from running away is the security of their two snoozing bodies.

I can’t stop thinking of Harrington’s stories. He woke up to find someone urinating on him the other day. He went to the Capuchin centre at 8am, “reeking of someone else’s piss”, to get new clothes. Worse, he told me people stopped sleeping out at the back of the Custom House, because they were being thrown into the Liffey by people coming back from their nights out, “for the laugh”.

He says anyone could end up homeless. That for some people it is only a couple of pay packets away. And that’s why he doesn’t understand why people look down their noses at him. “It could happen to the best of youse,” he says.

I stay like this, frozen with fear and cold on the ground, until 6.30am, when I notice the faint movement of a pair of magpies roosting in a tree. I stare at them for several minutes, then slip out of my sleeping bag. I desperately need to use the toilet. I need to go home.

Thursday, 9.20am

We meet back at the Capuchin Day Centre. I’ve brought the eggs Kenny requested in a drunken pre-sleep haze. “Carlow wants them sunny side up,” I say, relaying the order to the woman behind the counter. “Does he now?” she laughs. Blondie is here. She tells me she slept out sometimes when she was first homeless in Dublin. “Then when you get a place it takes ages to get used to it; it’s hard to settle.”

As much as Harrington wants an apartment or a house, he thinks he will probably always sleep with the window open, the curtains drawn and a sleeping bag under the duvet to re-create the street experience. “I’ve got so used to it now. But I do want a home. There’s all those apartments lying empty: they could give them to homeless people from the start of the winter to the start of the spring. We just want to be asked the question: would you like somewhere to live?”

Kenny tells me he is facing sentencing for a drugs charge next week. He is hoping for a suspended sentence, but in the worst-case scenario he can expect anything up to five years. “I’ll write to you from prison,” he says. We arrange to meet at Fáilte on Merchant’s Quay the next day for what he calls “closure”.

Friday, 2pm

Fáilte is full of people. Musicians, members of staff and one client of the service who is a ringer for Willie Nelson are tuning up for the weekly session. Foreign nationals take up most of one side of the room. A man starts shouting about his watch being stolen.

Food is served from a hatch. Harrington and Kenny haven’t arrived. I ask a staff member about the last government’s failed plan to eradicate homelessness by the end of 2010. He says he thinks promises like that one are a good aspiration, but he isn’t sure the appropriate resources will be made available. “Tell me how your man over there can be placed,” he says, pointing to a man in his 70s who has been sleeping rough for 30 years. “He will fall through the cracks. Many of our clients are heavily entrenched in drug or alcohol use, often exacerbated by mental-health issues. It’s not just about placing them: it’s about helping them to hold on to the accommodation.”

The two men and Blondie arrive at 3.15pm. They don’t notice me at first. The music starts and Harrington dances in front of Blondie, who is smiling at him and clutching a long-stemmed red rose. Harrington is slumped at another table, asleep. “They are not talking,” Blondie tells me when I go over. “Ah, he’ll be all right, sweetheart,” says Kenny.

We chat for a while, and then I say my goodbyes. “Look after yourself,” says Blondie. “Hold on to your life.”