No address, no vote, no voice: why are beggars singled out?

IT is a little known fact that beggars are frequently charged under the Vagrancy Act of 1847.

Their crime is begging. The same act specifies that fortune-tellers and any person who willfully displays any obscene print should be arrested. Sleeping in the open air is also illegal.

With regard to beggars, section 3 of the act says: “Any person wandering abroad and begging or placing himself in any public place, street, highway, court or passage to beg or gather alms shall be liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding one month.”

I have never heard of a fortune-teller being arrested, and magazines like Playboy are in general distribution. So why are only the homeless charged under this law? In 1985, the Law Reform Commission recommended begging should remain illegal. A few years earlier the head of Bord Fáilte described begging as a “chronic problem” in Dublin. The Law Reform Commission recommended that “a new provision should be enacted making it an offence to beg in a public place”. But it also said “any blanket prohibition on fortune-telling should be ruled out in any event as being liable to catch too many activities of an innocent or harmless nature”.

Is begging not the most harmless way destitute people can get money? What should they do? Steal, or maybe just roll over and die? That would suit Fáilte Ireland. Have we become so obsessed with wealth that GDP comes before these people’s lives and our own self-respect? The gardaí say they are only replying to complaints about begging, which is true. So, if I ring my local garda station to complain, can I have the local fortune-teller and newsagent locked up? If so, there would be a public outcry.

Why not for the homeless? They have no address, no vote, no voice. For this reason many people are indifferent to them. They prefer not to think about them as it makes them feel uncomfortable.

As Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said: “It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbour are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction. In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative.

“One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative.

“Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.”

So I urge your readers not to be indifferent to this injustice to beggars. Ring your TD, send a letter — don’t be indifferent. Change this law.

Neil McDonagh

68 The Strand

Donabate

Co Dublin