Sir, - I empathise with your correspondent Margaret Weldon (April 9th). I hope she and her children survive a terrible ordeal. I waited until the day before the sheriff was due and took a very difficult choice of temporary, unsuitable, shared accommodation, where I have been ever since.
It is three years now since I was evicted and I'm not over the effects of it all yet. I didn't have the money to pay a huge rent increase. I was already subsidised by Supplementary Welfare Rent Allowance and was just about managing to pay the existing rent. I was given no help by the Supplementary Welfare people, instead given an ultimatum to seek alternative accommodation, which simply did not exist, so they stopped the Allowance altogether. The Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council Housing Office also did nothing to help me since 1993. (The actual operation of those Lists has to be experienced to be believed.)
My two children were in the early stages of living independently of both separated parents and they were greatly affected by the whole impact of the trauma and still are. They, like me, have no family home any more. So, we meet on walks or in the pub, restaurant or cinema, which is no way to conduct family life.
True, I'm not out in the street in a cardboard box, but I know now what that must feel like and how easily it can happen to anyone, regardless of age, class, creed or anything else. There may be complex reasons in individual cases, but ultimately it becomes a simple matter of economics. Some people have money. Others do not - for various reasons, often through no fault of their own. But that's not the way society looks upon the obvious or the less obvious "homeless" people in our midst.
You can't do a job without a secure place to live. You can't get a place to live without money. And worst of all, the services in place that are supposed to help the disadvantaged, do absolutely nothing but quote point systems and priorities in the most hard, unfeeling and uncaring manner possible to deeply distressed people.
This is not happening to a few families here or there, but to hundreds and thousands of people all over Ireland. But, no one wants to know about it and now that the magnificent "economy" is slowing down the chances of anyone actually doing anything worthwhile about it becomes less and less likely.
So, if you have a decent place to live - enjoy it and live your life to the full. There is no knowing what can happen in the future. I encourage more people to tell their "homeless" stories. The realities need to be heard, loud and clear, above the propaganda of the smug and greedy. - Yours, etc.,
Joan M. Jennings, Queen's Park, Monkstown, Co Dublin.