Gardaí have launched an investigation into the death of a man whose body was found on a pavement in Dublin’s city centre on Sunday morning.
The deceased had been sleeping on the streets and was discovered just after 7am in the doorway of the Starbucks coffee shop on Westmoreland Street - the former Bewley's café – in the south inner city.
Gardaí believe he had been dead for a number of hours and that revellers in the city centre who walked past him in the early hours of Sunday believing he was asleep may not have realised he was dead.
A doctor was called to the scene and the man was pronounced dead before his remains were removed for a full postmortem to the City Morgue, Marino in north Dublin.
Garda sources said because the remains of the 10 victims of the fire at a halting site in Carrickmines, south Dublin, all require postmortems by staff attached to the State Pathologist’s Office, it may be several days before the cause of the man’s death has been established.
However, the same sources said one line of inquiry was that he may have died from a drugs overdose.
The fatality is the second among the homeless community in Dublin city centre in the past fortnight, with another man who had been sleeping rough off Dawson Street in the south inner city found dead on the morning of Friday, September 25th.
In the past fortnight, gardaí in the city centre have begun a drive to engage with those sleeping rough and to provide them with information about the services they can avail of.
The project has been undertaken in a bid to divert as many rough sleepers into hostel accommodation and other emergency facilities before the onset of winter.
However, while gardaí involved in the project have engaged with about 115 rough sleepers in the city centre in the past two weeks, the man found dead on Sunday morning was not among that group.
“It is strange but he seems to have escaped the net despite a high number of people who have been spoken to,” said one source.
The dead man is believed to be in his 30s and is white. Efforts to confirm his identity were ongoing on Sunday afternoon.
Gardaí want to speak to anyone, especially those who have been sleeping on the streets, who believe they may know him.
As well as the postmortem expected to be conducted in coming days, members of the Garda Technical Bureau are also carrying out an examination of the scene.
“We think this could be an overdose but we probably won’t know for a few days and even when the postmortem is done you are probably looking at waiting for results of toxicology tests and that could add a few weeks onto the wait,” said one Garda source familiar with the case.
“So we are applying our full resources to this and when we know the cause of death we’ll know what we are dealing with.”
The investigation is being carried out by gardaí in Pearse Street.
