MUCH IS OFTEN made of former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s infamous “Tiny Tim should get a job” quote, likely made in jest during an Irish Times interview in 2007 (though, let’s be honest, the man wasn’t exactly known for his knee-slapping wit). 

An upcoming proposal by Dublin City Council management, however, reflects very seriously that same Dickensian way of thinking. And not in the fun, singing-band-of-pickpockets kind of way, but in the less fun, “it was the worst of times” kind of way. 

It was reported last week that the council would this year move to introduce bye laws that would prohibit volunteers such as the Liberty Soup Run and the Muslim Sisters of Éire from providing food and services to homeless people in the city. The purported justification for such measures can be found in the Taoiseach Simon Harris’ Taskforce for Dublin report published late last year.

“The model of on-street services where people queue for food and eat in full public view on the main streets of the city is inherently undignified and is potentially unsafe,” the report reads.

This argument may have been intended as a critique of the soup runs themselves, but it’s actually not. Instead, it’s an excoriation of a city that has failed to provide safety and dignity for so much of its population for so long. One could also argue that the phrase ‘potentially unsafe’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as the report offers little evidence of any direct link between anti-social behaviour and the practice of setting up a few tables to provide hungry people with soup.

The report specifically links the provision of services to drug-taking on the basis that “while problem drug use is not exclusive to the street-based population, it is more likely to be prevalent in this cohort of people”. Okay, so far, so patronising. In the very next sentence, the report links this supposed potential for drug-taking to the perception of Dublin as unsafe: “Safety is a major concern for people in the city centre and visible drug taking and dealing is a contributor to that.” If you give them soup they’ll only start doing drugs, and in front of the shoppers, no less.

It is hard to follow this logic and conclude that this decision is being taken in the name of providing better services. Rather, it seems to prioritise hiding the problem and punishing those who acknowledge the problem for what it is and seek to address it directly.

If the rationale were more noble, then why is the process happening out of order? Dublin City Council’s first and foremost responsibility to the people in its care is to do whatever it can to make sure they are fed and sheltered. What about the safety of the people sleeping rough? What about their concerns? If you’re scared to walk down O’Connell St at night, then what of the people who have to spend all night, every night, on those same streets, cold, hungry and possibly in pain?

The report makes the point that those running the soup runs may not have the expertise to deal with the complex issues facing Dublin’s unhoused population. That may well be true. They do, however, have the will to feed hungry people where they are. To make no demands of society’s most vulnerable and to do some small kindness to ease their suffering. These services fill a void that has widened into a chasm during successive years of stubborn refusal to truly engage with the problem. For those people to be dismissed as “well-meaning” — as though they are a bunch of hapless do-gooders inadvertently making things worse — is insulting in the extreme. 

Nobody would argue that  it’s a good situation wherein people rely on volunteers to provide them with food. The city’s soup runs, however, are not a part of the broken system — they are an answer to it. They’re a workaround. The grassroots efforts of ordinary people who have recognised that the state and the city are both failing in their duty to their people, and decided to do something about it. The soup runs exist because the root causes of poverty, drug addiction and homelessness are yet to be sufficiently addressed. The solution? Get rid of the soup runs.

The idea that the city now proposes to penalise anyone who takes time out of their day and commits their own finite resources to ensuring that a perfect stranger may have something to eat is draconian to the point of being absurd.

Whether at the national level or at the level of the local authorities, Ireland’s elected officials and those tasked with managing towns and cities need to prove that they have a better answer to feeding, clothing and aiding those in need before moving to punish those currently at the coalface. 

While the council itself will draft the bye laws, it will fall upon the elected council members themselves to vote on them. To vote in favour of such bye laws before the city can demonstrate that it can not only replace but improve upon the services already provided would be shameful.

It is not the soup runs that put our collective dignity at risk, rather the conditions that have made them essential. National homelessness figures continue to break records month after month. A study by the ESRI last year found that 250,000 young children and their parents live below the poverty line. These are the kind of things that need to be faced head-on before you start talking a good game about “giving people a more dignified response”.

If Dublin City Council is capable of providing a more dignified response, then where’s it been until now?