Charity collects 800 Electric Picnic sleeping bags for the homeless

A Midlands-based charity is collecting hundreds of sleeping bags from the site of the Electric Picnic festival in Co Laois.

Portlaoise Action to Homelessness (Path) has collected a year’s supply of sleeping bags from the Stradbally site and plans to give away the surplus to other charities.

Path volunteer, Tom Duffy, said they collected 800 sleeping bags on Monday.

“We are grabbing two-men tents and we fill them with sleeping bags,” he said.

“Yesterday, I brought home six, seven, eight hundred sleeping bags.”

He was overwhelmed by the help from the community in Laois.

“I have 150 women in Portlaoise ready to wash them. It is a community response,” he said.

He has been contacted by charities in Cork, Dublin, and elsewhere, and will donate surplus sleeping bags to voluntary organisations.

“I am going to make sure that Path has a year’s supply of sleeping bags, which works out at about 520 sleeping bags,” he said, adding that the extra bags are “no use to anyone sitting in my house”.

Mr Duffy accused the Government of “not caring about people”. Having regularly travelled to Dublin to hand out food to the homeless, Mr Duffy said, “there are people starving, there are people dying in this country. It is a national disgrace”.

Mr Duffy said he plans to return to Stradbally next year, with “an army” of helpers”.