St Vincent de Paul to 'visit' 100,000 households

UP TO 100,000 households across the State will have received a hamper of toys, vouchers or food from the Society of St Vincent de Paul by this evening – an increase of 25 per cent on last Christmas.

“Some people may just get a tin of biscuits and we’re just really dropping in to see them,” explains Rose McGowan, Dublin regional president of the society, who has been volunteering with the group for 30 years. “A lot are like family if we have been seeing them for years.” Others, she says, are “newly-needy” homes and more than half have children.

Her evenings in recent weeks have found her packing and supervising the sorting of donated toys in a hall at the back of one of the Georgian houses on Mountjoy Square, Dublin.

Piles upon piles upon stacks upon stacks of toys fill the hall – the size of good-sized school gym.

They have come from school collections, businesses and a large proportion from shopping centres around the city where members of the public leave toys under the centre’s “giving tree” for the annual appeal. All are brought to packing centres around the city, with this the largest, and sorted into categories.

Labels – “girl 0-3”, “girl 4-7” “boy 8-12”, “teenage girl”, “teenage boy” – are pinned to the wall designating where toys should be laid out.

“The toys start coming in about two weeks before Christmas,” said Ms McGowan. “We’d love to get them earlier but we get them and they get to the people who need them, and that’s the main thing.”

The sheer volume of toys is the first thing that startles upon entering the hall – like entering a toy factory warehouse. The second thing is the quality. Nothing from the pound shop here.

“There’s a lot of V-tech, Playschool, Barbie sets, toy lap-tops. I like to see jig-saws and educational toys. The one thing we find very hard to get is stuff for teenagers, and you have to have something for them, so often we’d actually buy vouchers for DVDs – that sort of thing.

“The food hampers are being put together at the centre in Seán McDermott Street, and we do the toys here in Oznam House. There just isn’t the space to do both here,” she says.

“Most households will get food and toys, some will get vouchers for Tesco or Dunnes marked ‘groceries only’. Very few will get cash and only when we are very, very clear about what it’s for. I am always conscious that we are distributing donations from the public.

“In two days last week we had over 1,000 calls in Dublin alone from people looking for a ‘visit’ this Christmas.”

She says households have to ask for the help of the society. The society does not come uninvited.

“It is very hard for some to come to us. There are a lot this year who would never have come to us before. Some may even have been donors in the past.

“Yesterday I had a phone call from down the country – a house where both parents had lost their jobs and asking for help, saying they just couldn’t go to the local Vincent de Paul. My heart goes out to people.”

Any toys, food or other Christmas donations not distributed by this evening will be distributed in the new year, says Ms McGowan. “January is a very lean time.”