Lunch clubs, food banks and warm hubs: the older London Irish face a tough winter

Dublin man Jimmy Clare emigrated to London 66 years ago but the cost of living crisis in London is making him consider returning to family in Ireland even after all these years in the UK.

“It is an absolute scandal. The bills are going up and up and up all the time. The cost of food is devastating, absolutely devastating,” said the 83-year-old single man from Drimnagh.

“It is knocking my savings. It is depleting them very, very fast.”

Clare was one of about 25 older people, mostly Irish, who enjoyed a roast chicken dinner at the Thursday Lunch Club in a church hall in Finsbury Park, north London this week. The weekly event is hosted by the Irish Elderly Advice Network (IEAN), a charity that helps older Irish people living across London. As ethnic communities go, the Irish in London are among the oldest.

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For years, this lunch was a way for older Irish people, including the single and the widowed, to socialise and enjoy a hot meal. Now, as soaring food, electricity and gas bills eat into pensions and savings, it is serving other purposes: it helps reduce household bills and will be a warm shelter during the winter months.

“They come to places like this where they get dinners for £3 (€3.40). It stops people having to do pay out for a big shop,” said Maria Lane, one of the charity’s trustees, clearing empty plates and glasses from tables in the small hall.

This week’s lunch fell on the same day the Bank of England warned that UK was facing the longest recession in a century and that the unemployment rate would almost double by 2025.

Clare and others in the church hall were following the grim news closely.

“The UK is heading for devastation. Brexit has made it even worse and we haven’t felt the effect of Brexit yet because the pandemic has taken everybody’s mind away from what is happening around us. The consequences of Brexit are just around the corner,” he said.

At the next table, Brendan Finnegan (71), originally from Co Offaly but living in London for almost a half-century, believes that the coming recession will be worse than the 2008 crash.

The retired accountant is worried about what spending the Conservative government led by new prime minister Rishi Sunak might cut when the Tories reveal their fiscal plan on November 17th to fill the £50 billion (€58 billion) black hole left by Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership.

“They are going to cut benefits. That is the crux of the matter because there is an awful lot of people who are on benefits,” said Finnegan.

Sitting opposite him, Michael Kilkenny (74) who left Co Galway for London in 1970, is on disability benefit and has borrowed against the value of his Essex home through “equity release” finance to cover rising electricity bills and to make ends meet.

“They will make cuts where they can; the Tories have been cutting things for the last 12 years - there are not many more cuts they can make,” he said, referring to how long the party has been in power.

Kilkenny is feeling the cost of living increases; his electricity bill recently doubled to £283 a month. There is already £300,000 borrowed against his home, with compound interest of 8 per cent pushing the cost of debt up every year.

“By the time I die, there won’t be much money left in the house,” he said.

Neither man believes that Sunak will raise the UK’s state pension in line with inflation in this month’s plan under the so-called pensions triple lock, the pledge to raise pensions every year by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent.

Inflation is running at 10 per cent, the highest level in 40 years, so this would require a large increase in spending. The triple lock was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic because of unusually large rise in average earnings. Sunak has so far not committed to restoring it.

“They won’t pay it,” Kilkenny said.

Times are already tough, even before the coming fiscal pain. Finnegan says that without local food banks “in the sixth richest country in the world” the situation would be dire. He recalls seeing an older man recently at a local supermarket till having to put tomatoes back and pull bananas off a bunch he had chosen in his shopping because he only had £20 to spend.

“It really broke my heart to see it,” he said.

Finnegan puts his accounting background to use at the network helping other older Irish people with their bills. He recalled one woman receiving a recent bill for £468 for electricity that she could not pay.

“She was absolutely distraught. She thought she had committed the crime of the century to owe that money. Her pension didn’t even come near that,” said Finnegan.

In a back office, Nora Mulready, chief executive of the IEAN, says older people are regularly coming in with “unmanageable” gas or electricity bills that have jumped “from two to three digits.” The bills are a shock for these “settled, older Irish people” who emigrated from a “less wealthy Ireland” decades ago; “they know where every pound is going in the week or month.”

The network helps negotiate with the energy companies to “knock some money off” for people or find “hardship grants,” she says. It also tries to take a “holistic” approach to helping them financially, searching for other allowances, benefits or health supports to help the pensioners.

“It is such painstaking work,” said Mulready.

The unseasonably warm weather experienced in London recently has helped the situation a little but preparations are still being made for the winter ahead. Mulready says Hackney Council, one of London’s 32 boroughs, has asked her if the Thursday Lunch Club could be added to its “list of warm hubs” it is creating and planning to distribute to help older people through the winter.

“It is dystopian. There has something gone very wrong when we are saying that it is the norm for people to have to go somewhere to get warm for a few hours,” she said.

In the hall, Finnegan has heard talk of the “heat or eat” choice that some older people will face this winter. This is a concern for other charities.

“It is really worrying because older people are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some won’t be able to afford to heat their homes to a decent temperature or doing so will mean that they cannot afford other basics,” said Abigail Wood, chief executive of the older people’s charity, Age UK London.

The charity has assessed the disproportionate impact of the cost of living crisis on older people in London. It published data last month which showed that 25 per cent of older Londoners (those over 50) live in poverty, compared with 18 per cent in the rest of England, while 20 per cent were in fuel poverty, compared with 15 per cent in the rest of England.

The charity said the data was collected before the pandemic so it is likely that poverty will increase even further in the current economic climate. Wood said the findings were “alarming.”

The knock-on effect on older people’s health is a concern for those working on the frontline.

London GP Dr Hina Shahid, chair of the Muslim Doctors Association, which aims to reduce health inequities affecting the marginalised, has treated patients from the Irish community. She has seen elderly patients delay seeking care because of rising bills and older patients suffer flare-ups in respiratory conditions due to cold homes because they have rationed heat to reduce bills.

“When somebody has to think about putting food on the table or whether they pay their rent, those things take precedence over health and so what that means is that the health needs become neglected and so patients tend to present a bit later or significantly later,” she said.

At the Thursday Lunch Club over his roast chicken dinner, Jimmy Clare says his involvement with the Irish Elderly Advice Network “kept me alive” during Covid-19 because the regular contact with the network meant he never felt alone with people ringing him day after day.

“That kept my brain and body stimulated. It eliminated loneliness and isolation,” he said.

He sees a new challenge in the years ahead: he is “very much concerned” about the financial impact of Britain’s recession on him and older people in London like him.

“I have a few more years left in my body and by the time I go down the big hole or into the incinerator, I will be devastated,” he said.