‘WE’RE MUSLIM AND WE’RE JUST LIKE YOU’: THE WOMEN TAKING CARE OF DUBLIN’S HOMELESS
It’s 6pm on a Friday in February and Met Éireann has issued a snow and ice warning for most of the country, urging people to stay inside as temperatures plummet nationwide. Flecks of snow blow across O’Connell street as a biting cold wind roars under the arches of the GPO. Around the corner, on Prince’s Street North, Lorraine O’Connor is co-ordinating the transfer of boxes and bags of food from a couple of parked cars to a group of women setting up tables outside the post office’s front entrance.
After seven years of organising the Muslim Sisters of Éire’s (MSOE) Friday soup kitchen, O’Connor runs the evening like clockwork. This week they have 470 hot dishes ready to hand out along with fruit, cheese, biscuits, bread, fizzy drinks and doughnuts.
Outside the GPO, a crowd of about 50 people has already gathered, waiting patiently to collect their dinner packages. They include single men, young couples, families with five, six, sometimes seven children. Dublin accents mix with languages from across the globe as the diverse group stamp their feet to keep warm.
Shortly after 6.15pm, the women lined up behind the tables start handing out food and the queue begins to move forward. O’Connor hovers nearby, staying away from the crowd because of an underlying health issue but keeping a sharp eye on every single movement. “I’m kind of like the mother hen watching,” she tells me.
Marcin Paskowski is near the top of queue. An electrician by trade, he lives in a nearby apartment but rarely can afford food after paying all his bills, he says. “I try not to abuse the system so don’t come here too often. But I haven’t eaten anything for 72 hours; when I’m starving I come.”
A couple of metres behind, Leonard (20) is hugging his girlfriend Elizabetha (18) to stay warm. “We’re homeless so we come here every night to get fed,” she says. “We used to sleep on the streets but now we’ve got a hostel. Hopefully soon we’ll find a gaff.”
John Hennessy stands at the tables distributing hand sanitiser and handing out masks to the growing line of people which now snakes around the corner onto Jervis Street. He volunteers with soup runs around the capital six nights of the week and started doing security and general crowd control for MSOE a few years ago.
“No matter where you go in Dublin you’ll find someone in a tent, someone wrapped in a sleeping bag,” he says. “But the one thing they won’t do is starve. There’s someone doing a soup run every night of the week at least.”
I became Muslim for myself, not for any man. But I also became an immigrant within my own country
The Muslim sisters first started outreach meals nine years ago at the Merchant’s House Quay homeless charity. O’Connor recalls the shock on people’s faces when women in headscarves emerged from the kitchen with trays of food. “They thought we were nuns and asked what order we came from. They were surprised but they just wanted to know who we were. There was no hostility.”
After a few years of distributing food around the city centre, O’Connor decided in 2014 to set up a Friday night stand on O’Connell Street. The first evening was “very hostile”, admits O’Connor. “In the beginning there were lots of people who were not sure about women in hijabs. But when I told them I was Lorraine from Coolock, I’m a northside girl, it opened a dialogue. It gained trust and understanding. This didn’t happen overnight but the trust there is now amazing.
“Homeless people are stereotyped, so are Muslim women. They’re stereotyped because they have addictions, because they don’t have a home. They are the forgotten people in our own society.”
When the pandemic hit last year, the group put the weekly Friday runs temporarily on hold. “Everybody was terrified at that stage but then I got the call from Tesco saying they still had food for us. If I said no, all that food would get binned. We put a call out on our Facebook and ended up sending 60 hampers a week out my front door, most went to non-Muslim families.”