FEATURE Serving in a crisis
Brothers in adversity Steve Loveland highlights the way homelessness services in Dublin are responding to the coronavirus crisis
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N 29 February the chief medical officer for the Irish Department of Health announced that the coronavirus pandemic had spread to the Republic of Ireland. In the weeks since there has been a fundamental shift in how we live our lives. Many of us have come to see the reality of Proverbs 17:17: ‘A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.’ The response among homelessness service providers was swift and rose as a single voice. In the first week of March I began to receive calls from others across the sector offering support and asking for a commitment to work together in our response.
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Salvationist 25 April 2020
The priority has been to ensure our vital services remain open for Ireland’s most vulnerable people. One of the first examples of the cohesive response was the Crisis Cover Initiative. This aims to provide a crisis relief panel to homelessness and disability charities impacted by significant staff absences – absences that make it increasingly hard for essential services to stay open and disproportionately affecting some of the most vulnerable members of the population. This inter-agency initiative has been
supported by leading homelessness and care services, including The Salvation Army. While the primary aim remains to help the sector access crisis support staff when they need it, there is an additional benefit. On the day of the first confirmed case the jobless rate in the Republic was 4.8 per cent. By the end of March that rate had risen to 17 per cent. The Crisis Cover Initiative provides an immediate opportunity for many of those recently unemployed people to find work again. Small community groups are forming to fill gaps in service provision and care. The difficulties in securing personal protective equipment and alcohol-based hand sanitisers have been resolved by a roller blinds manufacturer creating visors for frontline workers and a gin distillery supplying Salvation Army services with bespoke hand sanitisers through our distribution service operating out of the Granby Centre Lifehouse in Dublin. Services in Dublin are coping admirably with the challenges thanks to committed staff and a supportive management team that is learning to become comfortable with an increasing level of discomfort. The Salvation Army’s St Bricin’s Night Shelter, which is managed out of York House, was closed to accommodate military personnel but reopened overnight as a 24-hour service in nearby Coleraine Street without a single client needing to be accommodated elsewhere during the transition. At the Granby Centre we are accommodating 100 clients across a range of services, providing personal care and medication management for 31 clients twice a day and for a number of clients three times a day. In addition to this a free GP service to the wider homeless population operates out of the service for five days a week and is seeing 250 to 300 additional clients every week. All clinics are open-access drop-in and are led by Dr Austin O’Carroll of GMQ Medical, which provides free GP services to people experiencing homelessness in Dublin. Dr O’Carroll has also been chosen as
