The news that 40 homeless people have died in the Dublin region during the first 10 months of this year may have merited the front page of The Irish Times this week but it garnered little attention otherwise. The reason, of course, is it is hard to empathise with statistics, no matter how harrowing. We connect emotionally with the stories that make people real to us.
Contrast the flat response to this week’s figures from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) with the genuine sympathy expressed at the death in February of Ann Delaney (47), a mother and nurse from Co Laois, who had been sleeping rough close to a Tesco supermarket on Aungier Street. Likewise, Donal Scanlon (49) from Co Kerry and Alex Warnick (42), who was originally from the US, whose bodies were found in the Grand Canal in July.
Their deaths are presumably included in this week’s DRHE figures. As for the others, we may not know their names but perhaps know more about their stories than we might think, based on figures for 2020 published in January.
We know for example that they were more than likely under the age of 45. Two-thirds of homeless people die before they reach this age, while 81 per cent of the rest of us live until we are 65 or older. We know there was an almost one in five chance they died rough sleeping. If they were men, the chance is even higher. If they didn’t die on the streets, then they probably died in a hostel or another form of temporary accommodation for homeless people, which is where two out of three homeless people die.
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We know that two-thirds of them were single, separated or divorced. About one in five would have had children.
We know that 15 per cent had a history of imprisonment.
We know that there was a 90 per cent chance they had a history of substance abuse. And if they did, then there was a 45 per cent chance they had a dependency on alcohol. One in two of the men and one in three of the women would have had alcohol dependence.
If they were drug users, the most likely drug that they took was heroin – most common among those with a history of drug use, at 61 per cent; followed by cocaine in the case of 55.6 per cent, and benzodiazepines for 35.6 per cent. Benzodiazepines include drugs such as Xanax and Valium.
One in four of them had injected drugs at some point in their lives. Almost half of them would have accessed treatment for substance abuse, probably methadone substitution. One in five of them would have been on methadone at the time of their death. If they died of an overdose, it would not have been the first overdose for a quarter of them. Of those whose deaths involved opioids, two-thirds of them would have died alone.
We know there was a 13.2 per cent chance they had hepatitis C, a viral liver infection spread by contact with infected blood.
We know there was an 8.3 per cent chance they had epilepsy, a brain condition that causes recurring seizures. Many of them would not have taken anti-epileptic drugs at the time they died, despite having a diagnosis. The incidence of epilepsy in the wider population is 0.9 per cent.
We know there was a 46.3 per cent chance they had a history of mental illness. If they did, then about one in three of them was not known to be in contact with medical services.
We know that there was a 57 per cent chance the cause of their death was poisoning, and the most likely cause of this poisoning was drugs. Most probably a combination of opioids, benzodiazepines, and cocaine.
We know that another likely cause of their death would have been a cardiovascular condition.
We know that if they were not a drug user there was a 50 per cent chance they had a traumatic death. Many of these were due to a drowning or were clear cases of suicide.
We know all this from the coroner’s files on the 121 people who were known to be homeless at the time of their deaths in 2020. The data was extracted from the reports by researchers at the Health Research Board funded by the Departments of Health and Justice. Homelessness is defined as being without accommodation, being in temporary or crisis accommodation, being in severely substandard or highly insecure accommodation or unknown accommodation.
The HRB report was published in January. The report was factual and drew no conclusions and made no recommendations.
It turns out we know quite a lot about the 40 homeless people who died in the Dublin region so far this year. The question is what we are going to do with this knowledge as winter draws in.