Sophia Housing takes a pioneering, holistic approach to help people without a home, writes Róisín Ingle.
"Wisdom builds a house. Understanding establishes a home. Knowledge furnishes the rooms with all that is precious and pleasing" - Proverbs 24: 3-4
In the dining room of the former convent on Cork Street, Dublin, three women are sipping tea and remembering old times. Between them they have lived on this site, an oasis of calm in a neglected part of the city, for more than 50 years. For most of that period they lived in an adjoining hostel, a place that could have been accurately described as the lay-women's wing of the Mercy Sisters' Convent.
These women attended Mass when the nuns did, ate their meals when the nuns did, took tea when the nuns did and went to bed when the nuns did - it was customary for the doors of the hostel to be locked at 10.30pm every night.
It was an ordered life, in many ways a contemplative life. Up to 20 adult single women lived there, referring to each other as Miss Ryan or Miss Burke, never using their Christian names - at least not in front of the nuns who ran the hostel.
Then, five years ago, the life of these women changed utterly. In an extraordinary act of generosity, the Mercy Sisters gifted the building and their lands to the charity Sophia Housing, who provide accommodation and support services to homeless people across the country. When the redevelopment of Cork Street is finished, that single charitable transaction promises to help hundreds of our society's most vulnerable. More immediately, for the women of the hostel, it meant that a window quite literally opened on their world.
"When we lived here the windows in the dormitories were nailed down - you would have been worried about break-ins before," explains Elizabeth Dunbar, who is in her 60s and has lived on the Cork Street site for 26 years. "You couldn't get a bit of air, you couldn't get into the garden. It all changed when Sophia came - the windows were opened, the place was brighter. It was wonderful, so new and different."
There were many reasons why women such as these ended up as convent hostel residents. Elizabeth, from Ferns, Co Wexford, came up to the capital in her teens and found an administrative job with Dublin Bus. She lived for 19 years in Stanhope Street Convent before the Sisters of Charity left and, in need of a new home, she was offered a place in the Mercy Convent hostel on Cork Street.
"I wouldn't have ever felt comfortable living on my own anyway and I liked the fact that there was a community in the hostel," she says. She maintains strong links with her family in Co Wexford and through her job found a circle of friends with whom she is still close.
Rose Daniels, who had previously lived in Dublin's Fatima Mansions, came to Cork Street after being hospitalised because of medical problems.
After moving to Dublin from her home county of Limerick as a young woman, Madeline Shorten took a job with the Mercy Sisters on Baggot Street. "I worked and lived at the hostel, cleaning and opening the doors for the women who lived there.When the Mercy Sisters moved to Cork Street I came with them doing the same job. I liked my job. I was here all the time except on Wednesday, my day off, when I would go and get a few bits and pieces in town," she says.
Up until a year ago, when new apartments on the site were constructed, the women lived in cubicles. They slept side by side in a musty dormitory, a boarding-school style environment for grown-ups.
"The nuns were very good to us but you couldn't say there was privacy," says Madeline.
"You had your own cubicle with curtains around it in the dormitory and you had to fit everything in there - all your clothes and your bits and pieces," says Elizabeth.
"It was claustrophobic," says Rose. "You had no space."
How does she feel now, sharing a spacious two-bedroomed apartment, winter sunshine streaming in through the balcony windows and organised activities from drama to art classes to karaoke or cinema visits filling her nights and days? "Years younger," she laughs. "I do, I feel years younger."
THE STORY OF Sophia Housing is not just about these women, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better illustration of what motivates the founders, board, staff and volunteers of the organisation. Once cloistered, these women are now part of a tight-knit, supportive community, while at the same time their individual needs and their right to personal space is respected. By Christmas, the Cork Street development will be fully completed and will comprise 51 apartments, a nurturing centre and play area for children, a restaurant, a laundry and the Wisdom Centre. The latter will offer holistic treatments and skills training to the homeless and those on the margins across this new Cork Street community.
The Wisdom Centre, which is to be surrounded by a water and wind garden, has been Sophia Housing founder Jean Quinn's dream for years. It was Quinn's vision of a holistic approach to the problems of homeless people, or those she says are "out of home", that was the springboard for the work.
Quinn herself, a former nurse, is a nun with the Daughters of Wisdom order, which she joined as a teenager in Sligo. Her life changed direction dramatically when she left Sligo to study theology and philosophy in Milltown, Dublin. "I used to walk around Dublin and see people lying in the street. I couldn't marry the two things: that I was up there studying theology and there were all these people who needed help. I started asking questions - how was what I was studying being lived out and how could I get involved in doing that?" she says.
She left nursing behind and joined Focus Ireland, working with that organisation in Dublin for the next 14 years. Another turning point for Quinn came when towards the end of her time with Focus she was called to assist a woman who had phoned the Samaritans.
"When something significant happens you almost remember the smell of that moment," she says. "It was noon, a very hot July day, and this woman who had taken pills and alcohol and was in a very bad way was sitting outside the Ambassador on O'Connell Street with two black plastic bags. She wouldn't talk to me, at first. I sat down beside her and after a while she just said in a slurred voice 'get me out of this place'. I took her to the Focus Ireland centre, carrying the bags under one arm and her under another."
Quinn worked with this woman for two years and they became close friends. "Once she got out of the cycle she was in - it was an abusive situation - she just started to blossom. She went back and did her Leaving Cert and then did community training. She'd ring me up to say she'd got a push bike, then it was a motor bike and then a mini. The world was her oyster. When she began sharing a flat with a social worker, she felt like she'd really made it," smiles Quinn.
Not long afterwards, the woman became ill with leukaemia and died 12 weeks after being diagnosed. Her story acted as a catalyst to Quinn.
"She had always encouraged me to do something different, to try a new, more holistic model of rehousing. Women would say to me, 'if only I hadn't left school early', and men would say, 'if only I had a skill'. I told Eamon Martin, who was then general manager of Focus Ireland, what I planned to do, and he came with me." Martin is now joint chief executive of the organisation. "We had nothing, no capital, but one of our early gifts was Cork Street. The Mercy Sisters have been wonderful to us," she says.
Transitional housing is now a familiar concept but when Quinn worked with Focus Ireland in the 1980s it was a radical approach. "At that time," she says, "people were getting rehoused and a woman with a child could have got a three-bed roomed house in somewhere like Tallaght which at the time was a wasteland. They would get very excited about that at first, about settling in, but then inevitably they would experience isolation and the reasons they became homeless would surface and they would start running again. Their inner life needed tending. That's when Focus started to look at transitional housing."
SOPHIA HOUSING HAS continued this work, providing space for families and single people to prepare for the transition from homelessness or life in hostels to more independent living. "On the streets or in hostels people become deskilled. You get out of the habits of shopping, budgeting and cleaning. You need help and support," explains Quinn.
Wherever Sophia Housing go - Ballymun, Moate, Donabate or Portlaoise - there is always a centre at the heart of the community where residents are taught household management skills and encouraged to continue their education or look for employment opportunities. The Wisdom Centre in Cork Street will continue that work, adding massage, art therapy and meditation to the services provided.
One of the things Quinn discovered through her work was that out of the people who go through the transitional housing services, 70 per cent make it. "The 30 per cent who don't are people who you knew from the beginning were not going to make it," she says.
"These people needed help with the things you take for granted. Getting up in the morning, getting the children up, washing school uniforms and establishing a lifestyle where there is a sense of routine," she says. "If they have mental health issues or problems with drugs or alcohol it's vital that you support them with that, too."
The bigger question in these prosperous times, she says, is how to encourage people to take responsibility for each other. "When I worked in India I was always amazed by how haves and have-nots went around side by side, with nobody seeming to recognise the inequities. As the gap between the rich and poor widens further here we need to seriously look at ways to foster a sense of care for everyone in our community," she says.
And that includes Elizabeth, Rose and Madeline, the former residents of the Mercy Convent hostel, who are busy rehearsing for their Christmas play, planning events, taking trips and generally enjoying a new lease of life, albeit at their old address.
"It's what we want for anyone who avails of our services. They are empowered. Flying their own kites," says Quinn.
To find out more about the work of Sophia Housing or to volunteer as a therapist or trainer in the Wisdom Centre visit www.sophia.ie. The organisation is currently fundraising for various projects around the country. Phone 01-4738300 for more details
