On the Town: Twenty years ago, when he first met the director and co-founder of the homeless charity Trust, Alice Leahy, Danny Erskine was sleeping in a coal cellar on Baggot Street, Dublin. Now, thanks to her help, he's a college student and a published writer in the new book she has edited, With Trust in Place - Writing from the Outside, which was launched by Pat Kenny this week.
Leahy called the book "an amazing collection" which brings together work on the theme of the outsider from writers as diverse as Archbishop Gordon Linney, Senator Mary O'Rourke and Christy Moore. She said it is the latest result of Trust's ongoing focus on education and creativity.
Author Maeve Binchy is in there too, with a story she wrote about "a boy I remember who was always a bit odd, who used to hum and sing to himself, and who has had a productive and good life", she said. There's a case for odd people, she added; if we let them, they'll enrich our lives.
Poet Micheal O'Siadhail contributed a poem "about the fraction that lies between all of us and the outsider; any of us, no matter how well dug-in we are, could be that outsider in just two months. There but for fortune go we".
Newscaster Eileen Dunne was one of many to pour praise on Leahy's compassionate work with the homeless. "She gives these people dignity," she said. "No matter when they turn up on her doorstep, she looks after them."
Also among the well-wishers at Dublin's City Hall were tenor Emmanuel Lawler, PR executive Pat Heneghan, director of the Prison Service, Seán Aylward, and the newly appointed assistant Garda Commissioner Catherine Clancy.