People in need - A republic that is not yet equal

REQUESTS for help from people in difficulties have soared during the first quarter of this year.

From January to March of 2007 St Vincent de Paul (SVP) received 2,853 requests for assistance in Dublin, but that figure jumped by 2,005 this year to 4,858. This amounts to an increase of more than 70%.

Although those figures relate only to the Dublin area, a spokesman for SVP confidently states that those figures would be replicated for the country as a whole. “We are starting to see people we last saw in 1999,” the spokesman said.