13.02.2025

‘We can end poverty… but it will cost our privilege’ – Cathedral Homelessness Lecture Offers Food for Thought

Known affectionately as the Mendo, the Mendicity Institution has a long and interesting history dating back to 1818. Historian and former director of Mendicity, Dr Eimhin Walsh highlighted the people who established the charity and those who attended its services and asked what lessons could be learned from the Mendo’s history in responding to the challenges of poverty today when he gave the second of a series of lectures on homelessness in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.  

Entitled ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (words from St John Chapter 12 which appear on the front of Mendicty’s annual report each year), he said that the words were often used to dismiss biblical support for economic justice or to justify indifference to the poor as the problem could not be solved. However, he said the words should be reframed as a question: why have you still got the poor with you? This, he suggested, made it a call to action.

The ‘No Homes To Go To: Dublin Charities and Homelessness 1790–2025’ lunchtime lecture series is coordinated by the cathedral’s research adviser Dr Stuart Kinsella. It continues next Tuesday (February 18) with Focus Ireland CEO, Pat Dennigan, speaking on ‘Challenging homeless, changing lives: Focus Ireland and 40 years of homelessness’. The series will conclude with a talk on ‘Ireland’s housing crisis: What now? What next?’ on Tuesday 25 February given by Ronan Lyons, an internationally recognised expert on housing markets and housing price indices, and both director of Trinity Research in Social Sciences and associate professor in Economics at Trinity College, Dublin. The free lectures begin at 1.10pm in the Henry Roe room in the Chapter House and all are welcome.

History

Dr Walsh explained that the Mendo was not founded as a service for homeless people. The name of the charity pointed to the issue that its founders set out to resolve: street begging. Late Georgian Dublin was a tale of two cities, he said. While the work of the Wide Streets Commissioners contributed to the construction of grand neo–classical and Palladian civic architecture, there was also widespread poverty in the city.

Dr Walsh said that most of these people had homes to go to but Dublin’s slums were among the worst in Europe. There were countless tenement houses around Christ Church Cathedral, he noted. In the late 18th century there was increasing national wealth but a deterioration in the living standards of many of the city’s occupants and the problem of begging was widespread.

“The Mendicity was founded not to solve homelessness but rather was inspired by an 1818 version of NIMBYISM: not in my back yard. The middle classes and what remained of the upper classes wanted rid of beggars, because with this ‘nuisance’ gone, they could feel safer. Notwithstanding the good intentions of many who worked with the charity in its early days, enlightened self–interest rather than altruism was its driving force,” he explained.

The founders of Mendicity were all workers themselves – barristers, doctors, merchants and magistrates – and firmly believed that only by employment could the issue of begging be solved. So they set out to train beggars for simple employment. This, Dr Walsh said, met some resistance as there were fears that employing beggars would interfere with the normal channels of employment and take jobs from a ‘better class’ of people. This ‘othering’ language and fearmongering, he noted, sounded similar to many involved in supporting disadvantaged people today.

The Mendo’s focus was, and continues to be, on employment and employability and it is not a housing agency. People who attended the Mendo did so during the day. They had to live within the circular road around the city and have no other means of support. If they had families they had to bring them in so that while the mother worked the child would be schooled, showing a holistic approach to breaking the cycle of poverty. The core services were food and labour as well as training and education.

In 1848 the Mendo established the first public baths as Dublin Corporation had no intention of providing them. This was a pioneering public health initiative, he said. It also provided a Transmission Service. Firstly it transmitted non residents of Dublin, particularly those drawn to the city during the Famine, back to where they came from to be dealt with locally. In the 1840s they also signed Mendicity trained people up for resettlement schemes in Australia and Virginia. Later still sailors and journeymen who ended up in Dublin were given the fare to return home.

Today

Today, Dr Walsh explained, the particular niche that Mendicity serves has been homeless men from Eastern Europe. “In many ways, the history of Mendo to date has been bookended by two golden ages of Dublin’s prosperity: Georgian Dublin and the Celtic Tiger. One of the sectors that benefited most from the Celtic Tiger was construction… A thriving economy with a need for more workers led to increased migration into Ireland. While initially many immigrants were from the UK, the expansion of the European Union from 2004 led to an increase of migrants from Eastern European countries… When the boom ended, many thousands found themselves without jobs. While some returned to their homelands, others remained in their new homeland and found new work. However, another group stayed but found themselves unable to secure employment due to language barriers and other life circumstances. In many cases, this led them to working within the ‘black economy’ with discreet payments which, when the work was done, left them with no entitlement to social welfare benefits. Without the safety net of the welfare state, there were few options open to them and many slipped through the cracks and became street drinkers and entered homelessness,” he explained.

In the early 21st century the Mendicity was essentially a food service. But demand for services grew dramatically after the crash. In 2007, 9,700 meals were served. In 2013, 27,000 meals were served. By 2013 the Mendicity had returned to its roots of providing employment opportunities that could help upskill service users and enhance their employability. With the increase in services offered at the Mendo’s Island Street premises, upgrade works were necessary and many of the service users with their construction skills found employment. This was the beginning of the what would become the MenDo Workshop. In recent years, Dr Walsh said, this had been complemented by a Mendo Coffee Shop, training homeless people to work as baristas.

“Throughout its history the services offered by Mendo have changed depending on the context of people who knock on that door. It has always been creative in its response, looking not just at homelessness, but asking what has caused this person’s poverty and what can we do about it,” he commented.

Responding to the Challenge

Working with Mendicity Dr Walsh said that he hoped the organisation’s history could help in responding to the challenge of homelessness today.

“On my journey here today, I passed several people begging before I was confronted with the statue outside the cathedral of the homeless Christ. I am speaking now in a building that has stood here for almost a thousand years and which for many hundreds of those years its walls were used to prop up the slum homes of the city’s poorest. There is a certain irony, indeed shame, that I am here to speak about a charity established to combat poverty in the city, and that 200 years after its foundation, it still exists. Any reflection on the history of such a charity, must also acknowledge the abject failings of every charitable effort to eliminate the systemic roots of poverty. While Mendo undoubtedly has been a lifeline to many, year after year for 207 years more poor people have turned up to fill the places vacated by others. Why have we failed so spectacularly to tackle the root causes of poverty?” he asked.

He said that the city had a “homelessness industry” combining private, voluntary and public organisations. “The annual accounts of the six largest of these charities show that in 2022 over €150m was spent on their homeless services. That’s an astonishing amount of money! I do not wish to disparage in any way the transformative services offered by these organisations, but when we establish so many organisations and allow them to operate independently, we run a risk of not using our resources in a coordinated and strategic way. It is the nature of corporate organisations to always seek to perpetuate themselves, yet the vision of a homeless charity must always be to do itself out of business. Could it be that the structure of the homeless industry is contributing to the persistence of homelessness?” he stated.

He continued: “We must ask why despite this phenomenal  expenditure, poverty leading to homelessness  is not going away quickly enough? We must also ask why are all those services I mentioned located in the centre of the city, within a stone’s throw of this cathedral? Does this concentrate poverty in the inner city, conveniently keeping it at arms length from those of us, like me, who live in the leafy suburbs of places like south Dublin?”

Dr Walsh cited Sam Tsemberis’s ‘Housing First’ model which he suggested offered the most effective route out of homelessness. The shelter/soup kitchen model focused on the temporary relief of symptoms but ‘Housing First’ offered stable and unconditional housing first while offering a suite of supportive measures that allowed people to progress towards independent living. He suggested that this was finally becoming part of the Irish state’s response to homelessness.

“Homelessness, as a symptom, is ‘easy’ to solve. Give people houses! Poverty as a cause is less easy to dismantle. The cure for poverty lies with us all. It demands we take a good look in the mirror and ask some sobering questions.  Poverty and wealth are comparative terms. Extreme poverty only makes sense because  extreme wealth also exists. The resulting continuum is one of social inequality. The NIMBYISM of the Mendo founders persists in us today. We say ‘yes’ to more affordable housing, just not in my neighbourhood. Think of the impact on my property value! We say ‘yes’ to more services for the poor, just keep them in the inner city. And then wonder how systemic disadvantage could manifest in protest, or as us middle class people called it when it bubbled over in November 2023, ‘thuggery’. We say ‘yes’ to initiatives that progress equality, but no to wealth taxes or reform of inheritance tax,” he stated.

Dr Walsh said that each of us, individually and collectively as society, is to blame for the failings of all the homeless charities to actually eradicate poverty. “I believe that we must be honest and accept that to make poverty disappear, it will cost you, me, and our children, the price of our privilege. Are we prepared to pay that?” he added.

You can learn more about the ‘No Homes To Go To’ series here.