Homeless deaths: Nobody cares about society’s ‘nobodies’

JOSEF PAVELKA died last week, a celebrity and a ‘nobody’.

He was 52, an age that can be a high watermark. None of his family was there when he died, in a laneway in Ennis, Co Clare. His friend and kindred spirit, Piotr Baram, was nearby, wrestling his own demons.

In all likelihood, Josef died through a fog of alcohol, which may have numbed the assault of death. What images flashed through his consciousness? Did he see himself as a boy skipping through childhood in Czechoslovakia, as it then was?