An Irishman's Diary

IT’S JUST gone 10.30am at the Mendicity Institution (MI), off Dublin’s south quays, and already the daily dinner operation is in full swing. Breakfast ended an hour ago: now there are 20 customers in for the early lunch sitting. Most are men, but there are a few women too, and one child: the six-year-old daughter of a Polish couple, who come most days now and eat together.

The numbers attending the “Mendo” for free meals have doubled in the past year, and eastern Europeans are a big factor. Poles and Czechs are the most numerous of these, says institution secretary Charles Richards. Or so he surmises. Diners are never asked questions; even their need for food is taken on trust.

One regular customer, also among the early crowd, is a woman in her late 60s. Austere and respectably dressed, she avoids conversation, preferring the company of a prayer-book. But she always brings a plastic container and, after eating, leaves with a takeaway. It’s presumed she looks after somebody else, somewhere. She never says.

About 50 people will eat before the midday session ends at 1.15pm. Then the focus switches to the after-school service, for local children from “chaotic families”. The institution supplies the hot meals, while its upstairs tenant – the Robert Emmet Community Centre – supervises homework and play.

Now just nine years short of its bicentenary, the venerable Mendo has seen a few recessions in its time. It was founded – in 1818 – amid one of the worst: the crash that followed the Napoleonic wars, when agricultural prices collapsed and thousands of soldiers and sailors found themselves unemployed.

The upsurge in begging then so alarmed a group of Dublin notables that they founded an organisation for the “suppression of mendicity”. And suppression was the keynote. By our standards there was little charity involved, with the founders aiming to reduce “the disgusting and baleful influence” of a practice they equated with “idleness, imposture, and vice”.

Their idea was that by supporting the institution, alms-givers would be freed from any obligation to support beggars. To emphasise the point, 33 men were sent into the streets daily with placards asking people to contribute directly to the MI rather than to individuals. The institution also employed inspectors to report “the more offensive and obstinate sturdy beggars” to police.

The no-questions-asked policy of the latter-day Mendo might appal its tight-fisted founders. By contrast, early applicants to the institution were asked numerous questions, and their answers treated sceptically.

The Mendo’s records for 1818 include the case of Sarah Smith, whose husband was a soldier in the West Indies. Under “income”, the file juxtaposes her account – “Never more than 6d per day”, with an inspector’s note: “Is reported to spend more than 6d per day at the whiskey shop.” Under “children”, the woman claims three, while the inspector adds: “Eldest girl borrowed from a fellow lodger to assist in begging.”

Two centuries on, some things haven’t changed. Whiskey shops are still a big factor for many of those using the modern Mendo. The surrounding block is flanked by a pair of chainstore off-licences with glass-wall counters, where customers put their money in a sunken hatch and the alcohol is passed out likewise, with minimal contact.

Also nearby is a Simon Community “wet-house”: a hostel where homeless alcoholics can bring drink. But there are many other drugs now too. At the opposite end of the street from the wet-house is a walled-off derelict site where local heroin addicts shoot up.

Changes in substance-use aside, the 21st-century Mendo occupies a very different world from its predecessors. Once the annual list of subscribers was a miniature Thom's Street Directory. These days, there are only a handful of donors. Income is mostly from bequests and returns on investments. For the same reasons that have increased the numbers seeking meals, the investments are not doing so well of late. The accounts will probably be in deficit by year's end.

With the bicentenary looming, the institution has also reached something of a crossroads. To casual observers, the stone inscription on its premises – “Mendicity Institution 1818-1954” – might imply that it ceased to operate in the latter year.

In fact, that was just the date its old home at Moira House, on the Liffey side of the Usher’s Island site, was demolished.

But the institution’s vice-chairman, Ohna McCaughey, admits the Mendo went through a lull in recent years: its very age an inhibiting factor on inheritors of the tradition. Now it is in the process of reinvention, through such things as the after-school project and counselling services.

“We were a bit moribund for a while,” says Mrs McCaughey. “But we’re alive again.” The Mendo has reinvented itself before, notably in the 1850s when it opened Dublin’s first public baths. In her fine history of the organisation, Audrey Woods describes how for decades, it was synonymous with washing. Thousands paid for its ablutionary services: ranging from first-class warm baths (8d) to third-class cold ones (1d), with long queues on Saturday nights.

Then the Corporation erected baths in Tara Street, and between these and advances in plumbing generally, demand for the Mendo’s facilities dwindled. But their job had been done. With Dublin a little less dirty, the service finally petered out in late 1909, when in the entire week before Christmas, proceeds from the baths reached a grand total of four pence.

www.mendicity.org