Penny Dinners: People can’t buy food due to rising rents

A Cork charity is reporting a noticeable increase in people seeking its help because they can’t afford food due to rising rents.

Catriona Twomey of Cork Penny Dinners, which provides 1,800 meals a week to people down on their luck, said a number of families are presenting at the charity because they are either ‘put to the pin of their collars’ paying rent, or have lost the roof over their head because landlords has sold off rental properties.

Ms Twomey added that the charity is also seeing an increase in deserted wives looking for its assistance.

She said in several cases they cited family breakdown due to the economic situation.

“This rental thing [large increases] is huge. It’s hitting people on low incomes. They [the Government] should do something about increasing the minimum wage.

“It’s exploitation and if it was happening in China we’d be giving out about it,” she said.

She gave an example of a young mother in her 20s with a two-year-old child arrived at the charity’s centre in Little Hanover Street recently.

Ms Twomey said the young woman was struggling so much to pay heating, lighting, and her rent, that she couldn’t afford food for the two of them.

“There has been a massive increase in rents which people can’t afford and others are being made homeless because landlords are selling up. A number of people we are now seeing have lost the roof over the heads and are living in one room in a hotel where they have no cooking facilities. They are the kind of people now coming to us.” Ms Twomey said that volunteers regularly delivered pizzas as a treat to young families in such circumstances.

“The people we are seeing are not those continuously on the dole. They’re ones in low-income jobs. Sometimes we also give them a couple of bags of shopping as well to take away. A family from Kerry recently came up to see a relative in a Cork hospital. They came in to us and asked could we ‘feed the kids’. The adults said they didn’t want anything for themselves, but it was obvious they were hungry too. Eventually they relented and we also gave them sandwiches and juices to take back with them,” Ms Twomey said.

She said she fears that the effects of the economic crisis are only peaking now.

“You’d imagine with a so-called recovery in the economy there would be less people coming to us. But that’s not the case, there are even more than ever.”