LAST week a picture of a young family, a mother and six of her children, sleeping on hard unforgiving chairs in a Garda station in Tallaght in Dublin was posted online.
Margaret Cash (28) and her family presented at the station after homeless services were unable to secure suitable accommodation for the night.
Photographs of the children sleeping on seats at the station were widely shared on social media, provoking sharp criticism over Ireland’s spiralling homelessness crisis.
The cost of rented accommodation in the capital is now well out of most normal families’ budgets.
There is a shortage of new social housing, with those in need told to go elsewhere. A similar story to what has happened in cities in the UK and further afield; gentrification, properties snapped up by millionaire landlords, young professionals paying extortionate rents for broom-cupboard-style apartments, while families who have lived in the city for generations are pushed out. We’re told this is progress.
We talk a lot about the ‘new Ireland’, the one that voted to trust women, the one that remembered how single mothers had been treated in the past and vowed to rectify that mistake.
But where was this new Ireland when Margaret Cash’s children were on hard chairs without even a blanket for comfort?
Sympathy turned to hostility when it was decided in the court of social media that she wasn’t ‘victimy’ enough, a Traveller with a record for petty theft. It was amazing how quickly sympathy turned to judgment.
People with privileged backgrounds and a good start in life judging those on the lowest rung of the ladder, deciding that six cold, homeless children no longer deserved state care or help due to their mother not fitting in a nice socially acceptable box.
Scratch below the surface of the new Ireland and you can see the old Ireland, where some would still turn a blind eye to women like Margaret being locked behind a wall in a laundry, where those on the up don’t have to be reminded of the by-product of greed and an inflated housing market.
North of the border and the Conservative-inspired and locally backed benefit changes, Universal Credit and the Personal Independence Payment which replaced the old DLA system have left ordinary people in despair.
Earlier this week Kirsty Scott and her disabled son led a protest after she had applied to the Department for Communities to receive PIP and Employment Support Allowance but was turned down for both.
Mrs Scott’s son and husband both died in tragic circumstances, leaving her the sole carer for her autistic child. She said none of this was taken into account by the benefits assessors.
Earlier this week a friend posted on Facebook that due to a change in personal circumstances she had been forced to apply for Universial Credit, a mainly online application process with very little human interaction or appreciation of individual circumstances.
And so, a person I know to have worked hard all her adult life posted: “What a nightmare it has been even applying... God help so many in our society, is all I can say. Suicide, depression and total despair is all this will bring”.
I appreciate and I’m always grateful for my privilege, I have a good job, a home and a comfortable life. It wasn’t always so. I was once a teenage parent in a damp council flat living on £57 a week. I remember what it felt like to push a pram several miles to my mum’s house for dinner because I’d no food and two days still to go until pay day.
Some people don’t have a relative to fall back on. Like Margaret Cash, they have no safety net. Place that alongside a society with a shortage of compassion and understanding of just how tough some people’s lives are, and what will happen to the children of a heartless generation?
Fixing this isn’t rocket science. Provide affordable child care, let mothers go back to work and actually benefit financially from their hard graft, build social housing, give children a warm home and a safe place to study at night and let them be a generation of achievers rather than the ones that barely survived.
And if the British government must continually penalise those out of work, there are 90 of them elected to Stormont. Maybe start cutting those benefits first. Work from the top down instead of from the bottom up.
