How many people die on Britain’s streets every year? Who were these people and what happened during the course of their lives that led them to die homeless and alone? Where were the supports that could and should have helped them to deal with issues of addiction, mental ill-health and domestic violence?
These are the questions that journalist Maeve McClenaghan asks and answers in her compelling, compassionate and hard-hitting book No Fixed Abode.
The story begins, like so many in this heartbreaking book, with a death. Two days after Christmas, Tony’s body was found, stiff and cold, almost frozen. The 57 year old died in the back garden of his former home, just two years after the property was repossessed by the bank.
Tony came from a loving and supportive family. He had a good job, significant capital from the sale of the family business and a warm comfortable home. But chronic alcoholism, coupled with a lack of available supports, caused a downward spiral.
The tragedy of Tony’s unnecessary death sparked London based-investigative journalist McClenaghan’s interest . She wanted to know how many Tonys were left to die. To her amazement nobody knew. Just as the homeless were invisible during life, so too it seemed, they were unseen in death.
And so began McClenaghan’s quest to answer her own question. Throughout the course of 2018 she collected newspaper clippings from local papers, tracked down family members, friends, GPs, statisticians, healthcare workers, homeless hostel staff and campaigners. The result is a book as much about the life as it is about the death of Britain’s forgotten homeless.
Faceless names
The author traces the life stories of a range of people who died on the streets, in tents or in unsuitable temporary accommodation. She takes the faceless names reported in newspapers and fills in their history, personality, joys and tragedies, and the many people who tried to help them during their darkest hours.
The portraits are intimate, with McClenaghan clearly becoming emotionally attached to people who, in some cases, she never knew. This adds a depth of humanity to the storytelling often missing in more standard journalistic accounts of human tragedy.
Of those whose lives were lost, there is a common thread. The failure of government to provide enough social housing, coupled with a lack of supports for those with addiction or mental ill-health, exposed an already vulnerable group to at times insurmountable challenges.
What is most troubling is that much of this failure is recent in origin. The author recounts how during the Blair years rough sleeping fell dramatically and funding for support service, while less than adequate, was still available.
In more recent years funding has been cut back to the bone. This has put huge strain on what limited safety net was previously in place. GP surgeries specialising in supporting rough sleepers are creaking at the seams. Hostels are overcrowded and new privatised forms of emergency accommodation, including converted office blocks, are becoming more prevalent.
Amid all the heartbreak and gloom, however, McClenaghan also has news that gives some hope. The upsurge in rough sleeping has seen an increase in voluntary street supports. Groups of people, many of whom were formerly homeless themselves, have set up ad-hock soup kitchens, street festivals (proving food, clothes and access to support services) and homeless art exhibitions.
In some cases, groups have even established temporary accommodation that is less institutionalised and more person-centred than government-funded shelters.
Scale of misery
McClenaghan also reports on the first official rough sleeper count that took place across Britain in 2018. The count involved councils, campaigners, service providers and the author herself. And while imperfect, it provided an insight, for the first time, into the scale of the street-homeless crisis in Britain.
One of the great strengths of No Fixed Abode is that McClenaghan tells the story in part as her own journey to grapple with the human tragedy of homelessness and homeless deaths. Importantly, however, she never becomes the subject of the book. The men and women left to die in the cold are always at the very centre of her narrative. Wherever possible she gives voice to people without a home. Where this is not possible, we hear from those closest to them.
Of course the story told in No Fixed Abode is not unique to Britain. As you read every single page you could be talking about Dublin or Cork or Belfast.
On December 1st, 2015, Jonathan Corrie died while sleeping rough in a doorway opposite Dáil Éireann. The tragic death of the 43-year-old father of two caused widespread public anger.
Jonathan, who struggled for years with addiction, was not the first rough sleeper to die on our streets. And he wouldn’t be the last. But the fact that he lost his life so close to the seat of power was believed by many to represent a turning point in how we treat those without a home.
His daughter, Natasha, told RTÉ that those in power failed her father. “He could have been helped a bit more,” she said, “like, they didn’t help him the way they should have helped him.”
Call for change
Five years on and little has changed. We don’t know how many homeless people die on our streets each year. The Dublin Regional Homeless Executive estimated that, in 2019, 34 people died on the streets of Dublin. In the first six months of 2020, 31 people experiencing homelessness had already died.
While we have periodic rough sleeper counts in Dublin, the rest of Ireland is a blank and the official response to homeless deaths leaves as much to be desired as the British response recounted by McClenaghan.
No Fixed Abode is a powerful book. It tells a very important story in a human way and in doing so motivates the reader to demand change. It is a campaigning book of the very highest order, always advocating but never didactic.
