It's been a long hard winter for the homeless, and with the recession biting as well, there has been a sharp rise in the number of eastern Europeans living rough, reports Alison Healy

IT’S 10.40PM ON a cold Tuesday night and 18 people are huddled at the locked gates of an emergency night shelter in Dublin. The shelter does not open until 11pm, but each of these people is determined to lay claim to one of the 21 beds on offer. They stand in silence, waiting. A fracas breaks out involving a man who will later be refused entry because of his behaviour on the previous night.

There is a surge as the gates open, and 18 beds are immediately accounted for. Shortly afterwards, the shelter is full and is also accommodating a 22nd person on a makeshift bed.

This is a fairly typical night at the temporary facility since it opened two weeks ago. It is typical also in that there are only two Irish people among the 22. Nine are Polish, four are Latvian, two are Hungarian and the remaining five come from Estonia, Russia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Italy.

The two involved in the fracas are also east European and are given a freephone number which will help them to find accommodation elsewhere.

All these homeless people will tell different stories of how their Irish dream turned sour, but most of them will include work drying up, no entitlement to social welfare payments, evictions, and alcohol and drug problems.

The Dublin Simon Community runs this city-centre shelter, which was opened by Dublin City Council after Minister for the Environment John Gormley heard an impassioned plea by homeless campaigner Alice Leahy on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland. She told how dozens of people were arriving at the Trust organisation’s drop-in centre in Dublin every morning, having slept overnight in parks, under bushes and on concrete steps.

The centre was opened as a four-week pilot project to encourage rough sleepers to move indoors. Its location cannot be identified to protect the clients’ privacy. Some people dislike shelters because of the bureaucracy and rules, but this facility seeks very little information from people and has a wet room to allow drinking in a controlled environment.

Dublin Simon did not expect that such a high number of east Europeans would arrive at the gates, according to its head of development, Pat Greene. He says there has been a large increase in the number of foreign nationals sleeping rough, but it is still surprising that the proportion is so high at this shelter.

Immigrants accounted for 9 per cent of rough sleepers in 2005, but that figure has now risen to 38 per cent.

“It’s official: we have seen a considerable rise in the number of non-nationals, especially eastern Europeans, accessing homeless services, day- and night-time services,” Greene says.

IMMIGRANTS ARE particularly vulnerable to the recession, according to the latest figures. The number of foreign nationals on the Live Register increased by more than 18 per cent in January, compared with December. The corresponding rise for Irish nationals was just over 11 per cent.

According to the Trust Organisation immigrants account for more than half of the people who come to their centre for food and warmth every morning.

“They are all very different,” Alice Leahy says. “Some came here without the language or skills, and couldn’t get work. Or people were working during the boom times and lost their jobs. They are like the Irish who went abroad and stayed together, drank together, went to church together. There is a lot of heavy drinking and a lot of misery. You see the pain in their faces.”

Some have worked in the black market and are not eligible for social welfare payments. Many have lost contact with their families and are reluctant to return.

“They don’t want to go back and feel a failure,” she says. “They are too ashamed.”

One Polish man had worked in a series of odd jobs, but work dried up and he lost his accommodation.

“He called into us one morning and he had been drinking and was in an appalling state,” she recalls. “Someone thought that he had just injected heroin for the first time.”

The condition of some people’s feet is particularly shocking.

“They have been walking around all day, and if they are sleeping rough they won’t take off their shoes in case they are stolen, so just imagine the state of their feet,” Leahy says.

Now that the prevalence of homelessness among immigrants has been recognised, Dublin Simon is seeking immediate action to address the problem.

It has almost 80 beds in its four night shelters in the city and Dún Laoghaire, but in three of the shelters everyone must leave by 9am. Greene says these night-only shelters should remain open 24 hours a day.

“Where are people supposed to go for the day until 11 o’clock at night?” he asks.

Dublin Simon also wants the habitual residence condition (HRC) to be reviewed. This prevents foreign nationals from claiming jobseekers’ payments or other welfare supports until they have been resident in the State for two years. The condition was introduced in 2004 and loosened up somewhat in 2006, but Dublin Simon believes it is accelerating the slide into homelessness.

Redundancies, supplementary welfare allowances and getting tax back are the main issues raised by immigrants who meet a Polish interpreter at the Catholic Church agency, Crosscare, twice a week. On some Friday mornings, the queue begins at 8am, one and a half hours before the doors open.

“Some have worked for a considerable period of time and then find that the employer never paid their PRSI,” Crosscare’s Joe O’Brien says.

He estimates that between 10 and 25 per cent of immigrants who seek help from Crosscare are thinking of going home.

“But some are willing to hack it out on the streets for a while. They are making a judgment on their own situation and obviously feel they are better off here than at home.”