Diners at Cork soup kitchen up by 55% per week as donations sought

A Cork soup kitchen is feeding 1,400 people a week — a 55% rise in demand in a year. Cork Penny Dinners, which was started by the Quakers during famine times, says 2013 has been its busiest ever.

This time last year it was feeding about 900 people a week, a figure it described as “staggering” in comparison with the roughly 140 people that ate from the kitchen before the economic collapse.

“Every day we’re seeing homeowners, renters, people who have lost their home, students, single people who are struggling, everything,” said charity trustee Catriona Twomey.

“Recently we had a mother of five who came to us after she left her husband after a domestic dispute. And then we had the old man and his daughter who had no money for food after they miscalculated the cost of heating oil, or the couple in their 70s who remortgaged their home when their son was paying rent and living with them.

“Now he has emigrated and they don’t want to tell him that they can’t afford to pay the mortgage any more.”

Diners are served soup, a main course, dessert, teas and coffees, and have the option of taking a sandwich away to eat later.

“People think we are full of the homeless, of people who have lost their homes due to drink, gambling and drugs. They are a very small percentage of the people who come here now,” said Ms Twomey.

A ‘Poetry Kitchen’ event at UCC tonight promises “alphabet soup for the soul” while raising funds to feed the charity.

The event will gather poets and other writers to read a work of poetry or fiction on the topic of food, eating and cooking.

“We will gratefully accept anything you can contribute,” said organisers Donna Alexander and Niamh O’Mahony.

Tonight’s Poetry Kitchen event takes place in G.27 in the O’Rahilly Building, UCC at 6pm.