THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:WHEN HE declines to say what time he rises in the morning, the prospect looms of an interview that might be all of five minutes long. "I don't like to say the time I start." The interviewer ploughs on anyway. Well, Linda Caulfield says you get up around 4am. "Oh don't mind her," he says cheerfully.
Hmmm. In the great scheme of things it hardly matters what time he gets up but suddenly, the complete absence of personal detail anywhere about Brother Kevin Crowley begins to make sense. He is not interested in talking about himself. And it’s not because he is media-shy. A blitz of publicity in recent weeks about the queues for food parcels outside the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin’s north inner city – publicity triggered by a bargain deal done by Linda Caulfield and supporters at the Mater hospital and a PR company – saw Brother Kevin to the fore as the centre’s director and advocate.
The bleak Depression-style photographs of hundreds of eastern European and Irish people, snaking down Dublin’s Bow Street, a place that once reeked of whiskey in the making and now boasts kiln-style apartments and an overbearing new office block, made news around the world, a convenient shorthand for the shocking fallout of the champagne years. Of course the food parcels are only the half of it. Every morning from Monday to Saturday, in a calm, kindly, entirely non-judgmental atmosphere, the centre serves about 120 fry-ups to the homeless, addicts and the down-on-their-luck; in the afternoons, about 260 turn up for a three-course dinner.
The fact that Linda and her Mater friends managed to pull in €50,000 or thereabouts from a €120-a-head charity ball last Saturday, at a time when such fund-raisers are being quietly abandoned around the country, speaks for the drive and mission of Brother Kevin Crowley. He won two Irish Timesawards last year for his services to the city and was named "An Outstanding Dublin Soul" in November. We admire the Irish Timesawards standing on shelves behind him. So where is the Dublin Soul award? "Um . . . it's still there in the box," he says sheepishly. Still? "Well, my leg was . . . " he murmurs like a schoolboy caught mitching.
And in fairness, the leg might indeed serve as a decent excuse. As might his heart. He turned 74 in February and admits – after much nudging – to having a history of heart problems over several decades. Last November, after another incident, he developed pneumonia. He was no sooner out of hospital than he damaged an Achilles tendon while walking through the church. For a man whose only outlet is walking – he daily covers 11km around the Phoenix Park or the North Circular Road in 60-90 minutes – it is a calamity. “Huge,” he agrees. The upshot is that he is now in hospital again, recovering from surgery for the injury, and dreading being back in plaster again. Now, he sighs, he tends to retire to bed at about 9.30pm, “since this aul’ leg, and because I can’t do anything else”.
THE WONDER ISthat he manages to sustain such a relentless work rate at all, amid the saddest, most frustrating and most intractable of human problems. The average day – in his version – begins at 6am, when he leaves his comfortable modern room in the little apartment block nearby, visible from his office – "yes, mine is the one with the dirty curtain hanging out" – to supervise nine full-time staff and nearly as many volunteers, and to help with the food preparation.
We may surmise that he actually rises at 4am, to pray and to nurture his vocation, which is, he says, the most important part of his life. “The most important part of the day is the spiritual side of my life, because there is no way I could persevere and there is no way I could do what I’m doing . The prayer in my life guides me along in what I’m doing here in the centre. And the people I’m working for and with – they are the most important part of my life, apart from my vocation.” The centre’s day ends at about 5pm, but we may surmise again that his does not, since he will make himself available to any soul who needs a chat around the AA meetings or English-language classes for newcomers or the many activities that keep the building busy in the evenings.
Still, he can never say he wasn’t warned. Life back in the Capuchin novitiate and the early days of his religious life was distinguished by disturbed sleep. “We used to go to bed at around nine o’clock and get up at midnight and go to the church for maybe an hour and a half. Then you’d go back to sleep and be up again at around 5.30 or six and you were up for the day.” They own nothing and have a right to nothing. “Anything we have is with the permission of our superior.” The friars live a religious life while closely interacting with all humankind, emulating as far as possible the austerity, simplicity and poverty exemplified by St Francis of Assisi.
Anyone looking for the history of the Capuchins might consult someone other than the supremely practical Brother Kevin, since he seems a little vague about it all, producing a page from a recent newspaper to confirm that indeed the order was founded around 1520. You will get no proud anecdotes from him about the mention of the Church Street chapel in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or how the Capuchins ministered to the 1916 leaders in the minutes before their execution or how Brother Richard founded Ireland's first gospel choir.
He agrees that the Capuchins came about after a split, when an Observant Franciscan, Matteo da Bascio, decided they had become a tad detached from their role model and ran up a pointed hood (which led to the name Capuchin, from the Italian cappuccio for hood) for himself such as St Francis had worn, grew a beard and went about barefoot. Supplies in these Capuchin houses, it was ordained, should never exceed what was necessary for a few days, everything was to be obtained by begging and the friars were not allowed even to touch money, I add. Brother Kevin looks a bit bemused by it all and says bluntly that he couldn’t survive without touching money. Furthermore, there is no sign of a pointed hood in the office.
THEN AGAIN, ITwas for none of this that he joined up. He just liked the bit he knew of St Francis. The product of a happy, rural childhood – his father managed a farm – in Enniskean, in west Cork, by the time he hit his teens he was already marked by a home "where prayer was never shoved down your throat but there was a great sense of spirituality, a great sense of love". He never knew his parents to be "out of home" at night time. He went to a vocational school and was delighted to get a job, any job, when he left in the early 1950s. The job was as a signal man with CIE, which took him all over Co Cork at a time when the chief entertainment was rambling to neighbours' houses and playing cards. "I never drank – I suppose that came from my parents. I was never inside the door of a pub before I joined the order. I had no desire for drink. Not that I was against it but it didn't appeal. But times were different then. Money wasn't as plentiful as it is now. The enjoyment was in the places we had when we were growing up. It was entertainment that we made ourselves: bowl-playing , hurling – though I was never a good hurler. I was seven miles from the nearest town. We wouldn't be going to the pictures or anything. No great excitement."
Through his teens, there had been a recurring niggle in his heart about a vocation. “I never wanted to give it a thought. Most of the time I wanted to get rid of it. I felt it even though I was enjoying life to the full – but I hadn’t the happiness. I felt there was an inner feeling that was calling me to something greater than what I was doing. Even though I loved my job, I loved people, I had loads of friends, but I wasn’t happy. I used to go to dances and I’d come home and I would say ‘that’s not for me’.”
HE HAD NEVERlaid eyes on a Capuchin when one day his eye fell on a advertisement in the Southern Starand he wrote a letter, saying he wanted to join. He got as far as the postbox with it, had second thoughts, and tore it up. A year later, he wrote again, and tore it up again. About six months on, he heard about a mission in Fermoy, attended every night of it, and wrote another letter. This time – after several pauses en route to the postbox – he posted it and word duly came back from the novice master to call to a named friar in one of the houses in Cork. He was 23 by then, but so scant was his knowledge of the order that when he pitched up at the friary on a Sunday evening he got such a fright at the sight of "this guy with a huge big beard and a brown habit" that he couldn't summon up the name of the person he was to meet.
When he joined up on Easter Monday, 1958, it was the end of his known life. “I liked a bet on the horses, a small one, and I always remember that I put a bet on the Irish Grand National that day. And I never knew whether it won or not because I didn’t see a paper again for four or five years.” He started off in the Kilkenny friary, then moved to Rochestown, working the farm with the others for a self-sufficient life. But it could have been anywhere. “We didn’t know what was happening outside. We didn’t have radios, or television or newspapers.” Would big news stories have been relayed by the superior maybe? “I suppose we weren’t interested . . . no, maybe not.”
Most people he knew said he wouldn’t last. A Clonakilty woman bet him 10 shillings that he would be out in a month. “It was about five or six years before I got back to her, and I knocked on the door one day and I said I want my 10 shillings. I wouldn’t like to tell you what she said to me,” he says with a hearty laugh.
LAST OCTOBER, HEcelebrated his golden jubilee – 50 years a Capuchin. In the meantime, he has moved around a bit, but has ended up back at something he started 40 years ago on Bow Street, when, as a driven 34-year-old, he decided that something had to be done to help the Dublin poor appearing daily on the friary doorstep. In particular, he saw the need for a day centre for a hard core of 30-40 hostel-dwellers, the older men who had a bed but were turfed onto the streets from early morning until night. The policy then – as now – was open-door, no questions asked.
When Irish Timesjournalist Kitty Holland visited the centre in 2002, it was packed with young men and women, older people, mothers with babies, foreign nationals. It was like Bewley's at lunchtime, she wrote. At that stage, 100-220 were turning up every day. Even then, the centre was also giving out about 300 food parcels every Wednesday, containing tea, sugar, bread, tins of stew, soup, cheese, butter, meat and jam – "and if people ask for more than one, no questions are asked," said Brother Kevin at the time, noting that homelessness had become more complex, that drugs were drawing a lot more young people into homelessness, children as young as 16, and that mothers and babies were there every day. After that article appeared on Christmas Eve 2002, an anonymous donor gave €500,000 to the centre. It meant that they could go to the government and ask them to match it.
The result is the fine centre standing there today, with its new extension, which includes a separate area for mothers and children, meeting rooms and classrooms and Brother Kevin’s own secluded office up a labyrinth of stairs to a room where the phone rarely stops ringing.
And there is nothing new about the queues snaking along Bow Street. When Carl O’Brien reported from there in 2006 – at the height of the boom – 390 had formed a queue, the majority of them eastern Europeans.
Some of the old faces remain from Brother Kevin’s pioneering days, such as the man who 40 years on still comes for breakfast every morning, having already polished off two or three large bottles of cider. “A lovely guy, no problem with him, but the drugs problem is serious,” he says. “My biggest problem with the drug users is the exchange of needles – people being supplied with needles and throwing them all around the streets. It’s a huge problem, a huge danger to kids and there doesn’t seem to be any control.”
Meanwhile, he has come to distinguish between the nationalities of the central and eastern Europeans in the queues. Poles, who were prominent in recent years, have given way to Romanians. “In fairness to the Poles, when they were gone from here and got jobs, a lot came back and gave money to the place. Now you see very, very few of them.” He reckons that the numbers are split 60/40 between foreign nationals and native Irish.
Does he feel – as some website forums allege – that the centre’s services are sometimes abused by the less needy? “Our main principal is that we’re here to feed those in need. It doesn’t matter what nationality, what they are – any person who presents themselves to our door for food, we feel that he’s in need and he is not refused. You always have that possibility that there are people who do take advantage, but why would you stop something and penalise so many people just because you have three or four taking advantage?”
In recent weeks, a “youngish Irish man, who had lost his job and was in fear of losing his house, was here almost crying because he had to come first of all for something to eat, and was then almost ashamed to ask to take food home for his wife and children.”
Despite the grand extension and the government’s €450,000 contribution to the service, the true cost is running towards €1.5 million this year, and the hunt for funding never abates. “If right was right, we shouldn’t be doing this type of work at all,” he says with a sweep of his hands. “It’s the job of the Government.” He is also concerned that “there is a lot of money going into homeless people – and I just wonder how much of that is really going into homeless people and how much is going into salaries and the organisations. That would be a big concern”. Yet, there is no trace of anger in him. Press him on this and he replies, “in fairness, they’re trying to do their best and I’m sure they will”.
It is difficult to discern whether he is simply reconciled to reality or a diplomat. It may well be the latter, given his response to a question about the saga involving his beloved Cork and its hurling team. It’s all he watches on television, so he earnestly hopes to see “a good Cork team” some time soon. And what did he think of the player-manager ructions? “Oh I’m glad it’s over and I hope it’s over. That’s all I’ll say,” he says, with a cute Cork grin.
“A youngish Irish man, who had lost his job and was in fear of losing his house, was here almost crying because he had to come first of all for something to eat, and was then almost ashamed to ask to take food home for his wife and children