FOR YEARS, Southwark Irish pensioners gathered in a disused local authority canteen before they were granted a five-year lease in a council building left idle until it is knocked down to make way for redevelopment.
Now the group’s hold on their home is under threat from an £83,000 (€98,000) budget cut that is expected to be approved tomorrow when the Labour-controlled Southwark borough council meets to agree figures for the year ahead.
On Friday, one of the centre’s quieter days, a group sat around a large table playing 25, with the sounds of laughter filling the room: “This place means everything to so many people,” said manager Rita Andrews.
From small beginnings in the late 1980s when Fr Martin McVeigh became aware of the scale of the loneliness and isolation of the older Irish in the district, the Southwark Irish Pensioners Project has grown to serve the needs of 400 people.
On a shoestring budget of just over £330,000, the project offers a place to meet during the day for pensioners, and outreach and befriending services to more vulnerable Irish – many suffering from years of alcoholism.
Since taking over its new premises in October, the project has put in internet-equipped computers, added a hairdressing salon, aromatherapy room and a pool room “with a TV for the racing for the men”, said Ms Andrews.
However, the elderly Irish are not the only ones in Southwark facing chill winds: day-care centres for Cypriot, Vietnamese, Asian and Caribbean pensioners are also losing their funding: “Some of them are even older than we are,” said Ms Andrews.
Defending the changes, Labour councillor Dora Dixon-Fyle said Southwark would create “three hubs across the borough” to replace the existing 12 centres: “This type of social segregation is hardly helpful when we’re trying to get communities to join together.”
Having given 12 weeks’ notice of its plans, the council intends to cut £1 million from the day-care budget this year, and a further £300,000 next year. “We will do all we can to help them through this difficult period,” she told Southwark News.
Ms Andrews said: “Many of these people have been using the centre for donkey’s years. And now they are saying that they have to make new friends. It is stupid and short-sighted. If they had consulted first they would have found that out.”
Over half of the organisation’s funds come from the Irish Government’s emigrant support fund, while the pensioners raise £30,000 more every year. The project’s chairwoman, Nora Higgins, said the 12 weeks’ notice offered has given them no chance to raise replacement funds.
Interrupting her game of cards, Betty Fitzgerald, originally from Longford, said: “I come here every day. I wouldn’t go out otherwise. It’s most upsetting to hear everything that is going on.”
Bill Hunt (88), originally from Thurles, Co Tipperary, and a 60-year veteran of life in London, once walked in wellingtons in heavy snow to get to the centre: “I wouldn’t go anywhere else. I’d stay at home. We really would be lost without this.”
Besides the day-care centre, the project has 70 volunteers and two full-time staff, including outreach worker Peter Gill, who once rescued an Irishman who had been living in a shed at the bottom of a garden.
“We moved him to sheltered accommodation. He was sitting in a chair, beaming at everything around him when we left to go off and to get a few other things for him. When we came back he was still sitting in the chair, still beaming,” he said.