Homeless Dubliners to give tours with a difference as tourism booms

New tours of Dub­lin, Ire­land to be launched mid-March will be led by home­less people trained up as guides by a social enter­prise. They will offer unique per­spect­ives to some of the more than 6 mil­lion vis­it­ors expec­ted in the Irish cap­it­al in 2019. Report by the Thom­son Reu­ters Foundation.

Dub­lin’s Phoenix Park boasts the offi­cial res­id­ence of Ire­land’s pres­id­ent, but for a while it was also home to Eddie Doon­er who lived there in a tent with three dogs.

Doon­er, 27, plans to return to his old haunt soon, but this time he will be lead­ing a party of tour­ists under a scheme which trains the city’s home­less as tour guides.

Ire­land is in the grips of a hous­ing crisis, with home­less­ness top­ping a record 10,000 people, accord­ing to hous­ing charities.

My Streets Ire­land — one of some 1,400 social enter­prises in the coun­try that tackle social and envir­on­ment­al prob­lems while also mak­ing a profit to rein­vest in their mis­sions — aims to give home­less people new skills and an income.

Enthu­si­ast­ic and artic­u­late, Doon­er is keen to dis­pel the stigma of home­less­ness while show­ing off his home city.

“I want to change people’s views,” he told the Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion dur­ing a walk around the capital.

“Just because you’re home­less does­n’t mean you’re a bad per­son — you still have a good heart.”

The tours, launch­ing mid-March, come at a time of boom­ing tour­ism in Dub­lin, which attrac­ted an estim­ated 6.4 mil­lion over­seas vis­it­ors in 2018, accord­ing to the tour­ism authority.

The guides will get 50 per­cent of the tick­et sales with the rest ploughed back into run­ning the project.

Dir­ect­or Aus­tin Camp­bell said he helped set up the scheme after becom­ing frus­trated at the lack of oppor­tun­it­ies for home­less people.

“We want to human­ise the issue,” he said. “This gives them a chance to earn money and tell the real story of home­less­ness behind the statistics.”

The crisis has been fuelled by a major lack of afford­able and social housing.

Rents have mean­while soared by more than 23 per­cent since 2015, the biggest increase in the European Uni­on, accord­ing to a European Com­mis­sion report last month which called for urgent action to tackle Ire­land’s homelessness.

Opening doors

After grow­ing up in care, Doon­er fell through the cracks when he turned 18. He says he was bul­lied out of his first home by neigh­bours who tried to force him to sell drugs.

Fear­ing for his life, he bought a tent and moved to the canal, push­ing his belong­ings around in a super­mar­ket trol­ley, before set­tling in Phoenix Park to avoid police harassment.

Severely dys­lex­ic, he says teach­ers wrote him off at school. Now in his own flat, Doon­er has recently star­ted a lit­er­acy course and joined a bas­ket­ball team.

He says My Streets’ three-month train­ing pro­gramme — which includes les­sons in storytelling, per­form­ance and cre­at­ive writ­ing — has giv­en him “an oppor­tun­ity to make a dif­fer­ence with my life”.

“It’s open­ing up a load of doors for me. I nev­er even dreamed this would hap­pen for me,” Doon­er said.

“I once thought I was going to be liv­ing in a tent for the rest of my life, and now I’m being trained to be a pro­fes­sion­al tour guide. How amaz­ing is that?”

My Streets, inspired by a sim­il­ar pro­gramme in the Eng­lish city of Can­ter­bury, set up its first pro­ject in 2014 in the his­tor­ic town of Drogheda, north of Dub­lin, and has so far delivered tours to 10,000 customers.

The pro­gramme, which won the Social Entre­pren­eurs Ire­land award last year, lets train­ees choose the theme of their tour and helps with research and presentation.

Irish comedi­an and act­or Tommy Tiernan recently ran a ses­sion with them to pol­ish their per­form­ance skills.

For Ronya Arya Phoenix, 44, the course has boos­ted her con­fid­ence and ended the isol­a­tion home­less­ness often brings.

Phoenix, born in Fin­land, has cre­ated a tour com­bin­ing Dub­lin’s Vik­ing past and her own pas­sion for Norse mythology.

She lost her home after her land­lord evicted her with four days’ notice. He has ignored a court order to pay compensation.

“Just as I was start­ing to get on my feet here, I was pushed down in a way that I could­n’t get back up,” said Phoenix, who does cas­u­al work as a TV and film extra.

“Land­lords can break the law and there’s no con­sequence. It seems to be com­mon practice.”

She lives in a cara­van out­side Dub­lin, where she can go weeks barely see­ing any­one. There are holes in the walls and winter tem­per­at­ures dip below zero at night.

“When you are home­less, it’s a very lonely place you end up in,” said Phoenix. “People treat you like you have done some­thing wrong.”

Patrick McE­voy, 44, who has been home­less since a rela­tion­ship break-up, says the crisis is get­ting worse.

“You see new faces on the street every day,” he said. “It breaks my heart. The gov­ern­ment has failed us.”

McE­voy described hos­tels as “worse than pris­ons and very, very demor­al­ising”. He is par­tic­u­larly con­cerned that fam­il­ies with young chil­dren are end­ing up in hos­tels with drug addicts.

The Dub­lin musi­cian is cre­at­ing his tour around some of his favour­ite Irish writers — Brendan Behan “because he’d be fierce good com­pany”, Patrick Kavanagh and James Joyce.

“I don’t see myself being home­less much longer,” McE­voy said. “I see light at the end of the tun­nel for the first time.”

Source: The Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion, the char­it­able arm of Thom­son Reu­ters. Report­ing by Emma Batha; edit­ing by Katy Migiro.

Fea­tured image: (L‑R) Patrick McE­voy, Eddie Doon­er, and Ronya Arya Phoenix are train­ing up to become tour guides with My Streets Ire­land, a social enter­prise. By Emma Batha,Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion. “GT” cropped it.