A spectre is haunting businesses across Dublin city – the spectre of visible poverty.
Last month the Irish Times reported that Dublin City Council (DCC) is considering new bylaws that will restrict soup runs operating in the capital. The measures, purportedly aimed at ending “unregulated services”, follow an independent report and recommendations from the taoiseach’s Taskforce for Dublin, which claims providing food to homeless people in “high-profile locations” risks safety, attracts drug dealing and “degrades the public realm”.
DCC defended the proposed changes earlier this week, saying it wants volunteer groups “operating as charities to be regulated as charities”. Housing official Mick Mulhern told councillors that while these grassroots and faith-led initiatives are helpful, DCC wants to implement a licensing system to ensure “necessary standards” are in place, lest homeless people receive inadequate care and attention.
All of this is for the good of our most vulnerable, according to DCC. It just so happens that it also involves moving them out of public view, away from tourist areas and shopfronts. Volunteers feel differently. “It’s extremely disingenuous,” one told me recently. “The council is acting like they want to give these people dignity, but they’re clearly just trying to get them out of sight.”
On Monday, “hundreds” gathered outside City Hall to oppose the plan, a video circulated on social media said. Those present were emphatic: soup runs are needed to ensure hungry people have food.
Homelessness embarrasses Ireland’s capitalist class and the politicians who manage its affairs because it exposes the gap between rhetoric and reality – the myth of widespread affluence is less believable when hundreds line O’Connell Street nightly to receive necessities the state has failed to provide. No invocations of GDP figures or assurances progress is being made can obscure this phenomenon.
The ongoing efforts to restrict aid in Dublin stretch back to the Famine and beyond. Then as now authorities respond to poverty first by regulating it, next by moving it indoors and finally by criminalising those who resist. This is how power deals with the deprivation created by capitalism: not just through direct force but through careful management of what the public can see.
Criminalising poverty, then as now
The Free State deploys, against its own population, many of the same tactics its colonial predecessors used. We see it everywhere – from gardaí facilitating illegal evictions to authorities removing undesirables from Dublin in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day.
Almost 200 years ago, the British Empire exported food from Ireland as its people starved, in service of foreign capitalists and the market. Today our government allows homelessness to reach record levels while international investors extract wealth from our housing stock. In both eras, the ruling class facilitates mass suffering to protect foreign capital’s control over our resources – and uses the law to target the people who suffer as a result.
If the expression “degrades the public realm” sounds colonial, that’s because it is. The rhetoric of “public order” has always functioned to portray the dispossessed as threats rather than victims of a system that creates poverty by design. British authorities began with the Temporary Relief Act 1847, establishing soup kitchens run by relief committees. This was accompanied by measures that criminalised poverty itself. The Vagrancy (Ireland) Act made begging illegal, while the Poor Law system forced people into workhouses, replacing structures of care previously provided by communities. Through policies targeting “idle and disorderly persons,” the state transformed victims of economic violence into criminals.
Policies that professionalise aid are presented as modern solutions to urban management just as Famine-era laws were framed as essential measures for public order. But strip away the bureaucratic language and the same old colonial logic emerges: the poor must be managed, controlled, and ultimately hidden while the systems that create and maintain their poverty remain untouched and unquestioned.
On-Street Food Services in Dublin: A Review
The continuity between colonial and contemporary approaches isn’t just rhetorical. Consider one of the reports DCC is using to justify its plan to obstruct and frustrate soup runs. It acknowledges the connection, noting “a long tradition in Ireland of food services for people who are poor and otherwise needy, dating back to Famine times”.
The priorities of On-Street Food Services in Dublin: A Review, published in 2021 and commissioned by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, stand out. Its author consulted more business owners than food distribution groups, gave virtually no evidence to back up claims about anti-social behaviour and failed to speak with a single person who avails of the volunteer services.
Mary Higgins – who as director of the Homeless Agency in 2004 said “there is no crisis” and that “eliminating homelessness is achievable” with sufficient political will – accuses street service providers of creating a hostile environment. “By far the most striking factor to emerge from this review was the atmosphere of fear and intimidation which has been wrought by some providers of on-street services, to the extent that individuals and organisations were reluctant to participate in the review if they were going to be identified with comments that could be construed as being negative,” she wrote.
Higgins focused on how soup runs affect businesses, arguing they disrupt city centre commerce by blocking entrances with vans, setting up tables outside shops, and creating crowds that deter customers. When businesses try to negotiate with volunteer groups, the report claimed, they face hostility and threats of public shaming. The report suggested after social media backlash over one parking ticket, authorities began turning a “blind eye” to violations to avoid further controversy.
Businesses’ grievances are often presented to readers in the active voice. But when making serious allegations against soup runs, the author resorted to the passive. Crowds that gather at food stalls are thought to attract drug dealing and other unsavoury activities. Free tents were seen as a major contributor to anti-social behaviour. Even when offering the reader specifics, this tendency continues: it was estimated that twelve people in four tents were using a doorway as a toilet.
It is difficult not to conclude that this is a report concerned primarily with perceptions – perceptions which, by the author’s own admission, exclude those who use the food services.
The public realm
Soup runs shouldn’t exist. But if DCC wishes for this to be the case, there’s a simple way it can do it: by fostering the conditions in which they don’t need to. Homelessness is inevitable when you run your city like a business, largely catering to tourists so that landlords, publicans and hoteliers can make money. DCC wants the world to believe Dublin is a cultural and literary Mecca, filled with craic agus ceol. But this is just marketing – it’s a deeply unhappy, culture-themed amusement park.
There’s no need to sanitise the city by targeting soup runs if you provide adequate services to homeless people. It is an indictment of DCC, and the state itself, that a single person, living in a country that boasts tax receipts of €108 billion, feels compelled to avail of them. The real degradation of Dublin’s “public realm” isn’t coming from volunteers helping our most vulnerable – it’s coming from those who’d rather hide poverty than end it.
