MORE THAN 800 people attended a crisis meeting of Dublin members of the Society of St Vincent de Paul at the weekend to discuss how to cope with a "soaring demand" for its services.
Calls for help to the society have increased by almost 40 per cent since last year, members were told at the meeting at Croke Park on Saturday.
The society's national president Mairéad Bushnell said the phones were "falling off the hook, not only in the Dublin office but all over the country and it will get worse before it gets better".
She said volunteers were facing huge challenges "perhaps challenges that were unthinkable before. Even when we were working in the society in the bad old times in the 80s, people's expectations weren't as high as they are today".
The society provides food, fuel and clothes to families in financial difficulty.
Ms Bushnell said the weeks before Christmas were always a busy time for volunteers. "But it seems to me that from now on all our workloads are going to increase as we are called upon to embrace new challenges."
She said members would find themselves visiting people who had donated money to the charity in previous years. "And now they are in very bad situations. We have already come across families who have such debts that the society is just incapable of fixing so we go to Mabs [Money Advice and Budgeting centres]."
Ms Bushnell said many of these new clients were ashamed of their changed circumstances.
"In some ways, they feel like failures. They may even hate the idea that we are there. This new poverty is going to pose a huge challenge to all of us and it will matter a lot to those people how we approach them." She also urged members to recruit more volunteers. "Otherwise in 10, 15 years time, the society will be half the size it is now and that's a fact."
St Vincent de Paul has 9,000 members in the 32 counties, with 3,500 in the Dublin region.
Rose McGowan, president of the Dublin region said more than €12 million had been spent by the society in Dublin alone last year.
Many of the calls for help were coming from people who had never called before. "People have been sick with worry before they call us. There are people losing jobs who have never been unemployed. There's huge delays in getting [unemployment] payments and they don't know what to do."
RTÉ's economics editor George Lee told the meeting he didn't see the point in being angry at a Government which had refused to face up to looming crisis. "But I am a bit annoyed and alarmed at the suggestion that we are all in it together, that is the thesis which is influencing policy decisions."
It was wrong to suggest that the economic crisis took everyone by surprise, he said. "I could see this thing coming . . . anybody who didn't have their heads stuck in the sand could see it coming. So why do we say now that we are suddenly hit by something which we never saw coming and we're in it together?"
The Government had a €9 billion surplus at the end of 2006, but next year the exchequer was going to be €5 billion short. "I believe mistakes have been made," he said.
The economy went into recession much quicker than other economies "because we pushed the property market to such an extent that it was providing directly 18 per cent of all the taxes coming into the Government".
The Government lost "an enormous amount of money" by giving massive tax breaks to people with several houses. Then it tried to put an income levy on people earning a minimum wage, he said. He pointed to the Budget allocation of €8.2 billion on unspecified capital expenditure and contrasted it with the decision to shelve the cervical cancer vaccination programme to save €10 million.
"There are choices being made," he said. "But when it comes to policy, you have to have a sense of the values of your society."
