Archbishop Diarmuid Martin opens diocesan homeless hostel

Patrick is 33, from Dún Laoghaire and "ashamed to say I was using [heroin] since I was 11, selling since 12."

He has been sleeping rough for years “in doorways and all that”.

Last Sunday night, Patrick was just lucky. “Young lads going by” set his sleeping bag and three others on fire in Dublin’s O’Connell Street. Young lads, “because they’re not homeless, picking on people who are homeless.”

He showed the burn marks on his runners. “It might have been my face up in flames,” he said.

He escaped his sleeping bag, “mine had a fire blanket”, and pulled his companions from theirs.

Patrick was speaking on Wednesday to The Irish Times at the new St Mary’s Hostel for the homeless in Dublin’s inner city, provided by Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese and opened by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

“I wasn’t going into hostels,” he said. He wanted to stay away from drugs and violence. “And they throw you out at a quarter to eight [in the morning].”

Then the social worker said “If we can find a place you can stay for six months solid, would you go? I said I would if you mean it.”

‘Getting a chance’

That was how he arrived on Tuesday at St Mary’s hostel. It’s “clean and tidy”, and the other residents were “all off it [heroin].” He was “getting a chance” and hoped to stay “a couple of months”.

Patrick is one of 25 homeless people staying there. Warm and comfortable with an up-to-date kitchen, it provides meals in a large dining room.

With accommodation for 35, it is run by Crosscare, an agency of Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese. It owns the building and refurbished it extensively recently.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin remarked: “It’s a good facility. The idea is to get some [people] out of bad environments for them. No time limit [on how long people stay], if necessary.”

‘Rough places’

The hostel is “taking people who are reasonably stable, to get them out of the really rough places. One lad had been stabbed. If they have an address they can get a job. They can be clean. They can come in and out during the day.”

The current furore over homelessness “shouldn’t be just a one-day outrage”, he said. “It is amazing. We’ve now got so many different beds, 270 by next week. Why wasn’t that possible before? Credit to the Lord Mayor and the Minister that they banged heads together, and to all the agencies.”

The hostel had previously been Open Heart House, a partnership between the archdiocese, the business community and religious congregations to help people suffering with HIV/Aids, in a building donated by former Archbishop of Dublin Cardinal Desmond Connell.

Open House chief executive Paula Gilmore said they had been there 19 years. "At the peak of our service we had over 1,000 members and over the years then the numbers started dwindling, as the quality of life of people living with HIV improved."

Their’s was “a success story”, and the premises was handed back to the archdiocese earlier this month.