Poverty in rural Ireland: How the SVP are helping people fight back 

Aifric McGlinchey talks to St Vincent de Paul about their work in rural areas. 

A SWEEPING driveway leads up to the four-bedroomed home on the acre of land. In the garage, there are two luxury cars. But something is slightly wrong. The landscaped garden is looking unkempt. If you look closely, the tax and insurance are out of date on both cars. And the tyres are bald.

The front door opens. A woman invites in the volunteers. Her husband has gone for a walk. The children are upstairs: which is just as well, because within minutes she is sobbing. Ever since the bank crash, St Vincent de Paul volunteers regularly call to the New Poor in the most sought after addresses in the city and in trophy homes across the countryside.

“These are people who before would have been earning €100,000 to €200 000 a year,” says Brendan Dempsey of St Vincent de Paul in Cork. “Then one or both of them lose their jobs, or, if self-employed, they go bankrupt. Usually, they don’t ask for help until literally the lights go out.

I wish they’d contact us sooner because then we wouldn’t have to pay to have the lights put on again. We negotiate a deal where the companies are obliged by law to put in a pay-as-you-go meter. A quarter of the meter card goes into paying arrears, which could be up to €1,000, but they can’t turn you off. That helps greatly.

“Usually the woman is bawling,” says Brendan. “You try to be as sensitive, as gentle as you can. How many children do you have? How are you for clothes, for food, for shoes? Usually she’s depending on her sister or brother. We ask what bills are outstanding: gas, electricity. You can be sure the insurance has been dropped, and for us that’s shocking.

It’s usually only a couple of hundred so we’ll pay that. Then we say where do you shop? We’ll give them food vouchers. Of course, we wouldn’t want them buying champagne, but I wouldn’t object to them buying cigarettes. We tell them it’s not us they have to thank, it’s their neighbours. We’re just passing the money on.

“Often, people who’ve been living at the bottom of the ladder on social welfare are best off these days,” says Brendan. “They have learned to make do. They have the medical card, rent allowance, and while they don’t have much in life, they’re not hungry. The most pathetic cases you come across now are the self-employed whose business goes bankrupt.

“In the country, farmers rarely come for help. In two cases I’ve seen, it was simply to ask for food. They had a deep freeze and we filled it for them. But it’s not just food. Sometimes it’s education. A man in the country was dying of cancer and we used to visit him. He had a big family and he asked us to look after the kids.

We promised that we would. One was a young boy who wasn’t great academically, and he wanted to be a marine engineer of all things. But he failed maths. We have 120 young people in our organisation who give grinds to Leaving Cert students.

So two young girls helped him, and he scraped through. He is now an engineer on the biggest oil tanker in the world. Most Christmases we get a card from the Pacific or South Seas and there’s $100 in it.

“There was also a 15-year-old girl who had a baby. She went back to school, and later we helped her through college. We organised a child minder for another woman whose husband left, so she could go to university and then get a job.”

As well as food parcels, accommodation, bills and education, St Vincent de Paul also deals with simple loneliness. “In the country, there are many lonely bachelor farmers or widows. Some volunteers call to old people living alone just to talk to them. They might drive Eileen out for a bit of shopping.

They don’t usually deal with money, but they might give Mary a hairdo, which would do wonders for her morale. There are a lot of suicides, because of loneliness, isolation and depression. Although we get training, we wouldn’t be qualified to counsel, but we’d direct people to an organisation called Shine.

St Vincent de Paul has been fighting poverty in Ireland for 170 years, more or less since the Famine, and a book commemorating its work has just been published by New Island, edited by Bill Lawlor and Joe Dalton. The book describes the history, ethos and operation of the Society, as well as personal stories of volunteers.

One volunteer talks about visiting a woman on her birthday, and bringing her a birthday card, chocolates and flowers. “She was overwhelmed, because she had never received a card in her life, and she was in her 80s. You’d think she’d won the Lotto, she was so happy.”

Volunteers are taught that you can never underestimate the power of a kind word, a touch, a genuine compliment, a listening ear. Undoubtedly, the work is often harrowing for the volunteers.

“I’ve come out of places and cried,” says Brendan. “I remember going to the house of a young single mum and she had a little boy aged three.

The rent arrears had mounted and she started to cry. While we were talking to her, the little man was pulling at the leg of my pants — I can still see his face — and he said, ‘will you be my dad?’ And you know, every little man should have a dad. I went to the car and cried.

The volunteers are from every country and every nationality. Quite a number of the volunteers got help themselves, and they make the very best of members. “All we ask is that they adhere to our ethos. You need compassion and generosity of spirit. You’re either born with that or you’re not.”

Meanwhile, in the home with the two cars, the lights are back on. And hope has returned.