If I asked you to imagine, could you? Imagine you’ve just woken up, and you realise you’ve been having a bad dream. You’re in a train station, and you have a position of responsibility in management of the station. You’re on your way out, and on the track alongside you, a train is just easing up to the buffers at the end of its journey, but you suddenly feel alarmed. It’s not stopping! It grinds very slowly crushing the buffers and pushing its way beyond the platform end into a shop, squeezing the wall of the shop as it concertinas inward. All happening in a kind of slow-motion, you have a vague sense that none of the people around have noticed what’s happening, and you find yourself running, running, desperate to let someone know that a train has just overridden the stops at the end of the track and is about to destroy the station. Except, you’re running, but you don’t know who you’re running to inform, nor why no-one seems to notice but you.
Wet nightclothes, wet bed. Oh no! Have you wet your bed? It takes a while to come down from the panic, to notice how dry your throat feels, how raspy your breath is, feeling your heartbeat in your ears beating three or four beats a minute slower, second by second. No! Thank goodness, it’s just sweat. Even waking up is part of the nightmare. What does it mean? Is the train my life, is the squashed shop what’s left of everything I had? And nobody notices, perhaps because it’s only happening to me and not them. Don’t they even care?
Loneliness…isolation… people notice you out of the corner of their eye. They’d love to be able to help you, but they can’t. They feel as helpless as you do, but they can’t let anyone know that, so they divert their eyes, walk on by, shake their heads, or say, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any change.”
Who would recognize this story? Well, anyone who has had such a dream, or perhaps anyone who can say it’s not a dream, but a reality in their experience. How many people are living this nightmare, as their daily reality, their real, waking dream?
Is it fair? Is it decent that as a society we prefer to spend our tax money building and stocking the shops, rather than building buffers capable of stopping even the fullest, heaviest train?
WHAT IF?
If again I ask you to imagine, could you? Imagine time has passed, and not only the pandemic has been left behind, but you are watching an interview on TV Daily News…
Extract from a TV Interview with one of our founding members in June 2024
“We spoke at length about how society has perceived people and the crisis as it was, and we knew that a total change in thinking was needed so we created a campaign to roll out through schools, churches, colleges and homes, which had people rethink their current paradigms and become more open and aware of the possibilities and probabilities for homeless families and people on the streets in this country and that program was incredibly successful and has levelled up our society and our way of getting behind a crisis to end it.”
Irish Times front page article July 2024
END IN SIGHT FOR HOMELESSNESS
The government has given its full support on all aspects of the Homefullness Ireland project and has agreed to help with and legislate for whatever is needed to make this reality. “This has been a massive win and is a real feel-good moment for us and the country” says a spokesperson for the project.
The government and county councils have joined forces and are working with building contractors, land developers, architects etc to provide funding and grants whenever and wherever possible. This is seen as a brilliant win, bringing about a genuine sense of cohesion for Homefullness Ireland.
One of the biggest breakthroughs reported, was when three of the biggest charities recognised that by joining forces, their lobby with central government, and the flexibility this gave to their range was beyond anything they had previously thought possible or even desirable. They are now a force to be reckoned with and are key drivers of this bus. The project spokesperson again: “It’s impossible to express the excitement and satisfaction that we’ve felt because of this. What a huge achievement!!!”
SUMMING UP
With enough bright minds coming together, who knows what could be achieved? Who is innocent, optimistic, naïve enough to want to disrupt the passionately-intended, incremental approach of existing experts in the field? Who would turn the world on its head and re-think lifting the lives of millions of people who would otherwise live their version of that nightmare? Could that be you, or anyone you know?