‘Living on the streets is safer, I prefer to sleep outside. But I’m frozen and exhausted’

On an icy, grey January morning on the streets of Dublin, Julie McDonagh is sitting on the pavement outside McDonald’s on Mary Street.

She’s wearing a small black jacket and a baseball cap – poor protection on a winter’s morning when temperatures are only a few degrees above freezing.

McDonagh is no stranger to being outdoors during cold snaps – she has been homeless on and off for more than 20 years and was sleeping outdoors during the big freeze of 2009/10.

The 38-year-old is a familiar face to many living around the Dublin 1 and Dublin 8 areas, with several passersby greeting her warmly. She is currently staying in a hostel on Ellis Quay but struggles being outdoors on these icy mornings.

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“The guards move me on all the time,” she says. “They arrested me during Covid and locked me up for a public order offence. They said I spat at a garda, which wasn’t true.”

[ Man who died while sleeping rough on Dublin street identified ]

McDonagh says she relies on alcohol to get through the day and “dabbles” in other stuff. She has tried to overcome her addiction, but says it is too hard.

“I’ve been in care since I was six-weeks-old,” she says. “I went straight from care to the streets. People keep making promises but no one keeps their promises. You need to write about the way we live.”

She notes that a homeless man was found dead on St Andrew’s Street in Dublin earlier this week. “There’s people out protesting about the refugees but what about us, why aren’t they protesting for us?”

Around the corner on O’Connell Street, a middle-aged man is wrapped up in a black sleeping bag in a doorway under the GPO’s towering limestone portico.

He seems surprised when approached and pulls himself into a seated position.

“I have bad English,” he explains before pulling out a translator app on his phone. His name is Jacek and he is from Warsaw, Poland. He has lived in Ireland for three years.

“I worked in construction but I was paid on the black market,” he explains using the app. “I’ve been outside for three weeks now.”

The 51-year-old has stayed in homeless hostels but says he feels unsafe in most of the city’s emergency accommodation centres.

“Living on the streets is safer, I prefer to sleep outside. But I’m frozen and exhausted,” he adds as his eyes fill with tears.

Jacek’s finger tips are white with the cold and he struggles to hold his phone due to the freezing conditions. When asked if he has friends or family in Ireland, he slowly shakes his head. He gestures to a gash on his forehead before explaining that he was attacked by a man using drugs on the street the night before.

“I was a police officer in Warsaw, I worked for many years, I’m so tired,” he adds.

On the southside of the city, a woman sits on strips of cardboard outside the Tesco express on Aungier Street. Dressed in a blue jumper, black leggings and woollen socks, the woman says she has been sleeping rough in the south inner city for about five years.

She is reluctant to speak and refuses to give her name, but chuckles when asked how she is keeping warm during this cold snap.

“There’s all this talk around HRT for women my age but we can actually deal with this cold weather in a natural way – turns out the hot flushes are useful.”

The woman says a representative from Dublin homelessness services spoke to her earlier that day but she does not accept their help. She says she went to one organisation a few years ago in the middle of a cold snap and “they turned me away at 2am, so I ignore them now”.

More reporting is needed on the psychological impact of sleeping rough, particularly for women, she adds.

She also speaks about the man who died on St Andrew’s Street earlier this week before mentioning another man whose body was found on a street in Rathmines last year.

“His body lay there for three days before anyone found him, ” she says. “Things don’t even get that bad in New York.”

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