WIP

Ten Questions with Fr. Peter McVerry

by: Tess Brady

Fr. Peter McVerry, founder of the Peter McVerry Trust, which has built hostels for homeless youths in Dublin city. Fr. McVerry has been working in the area of homelessness for over thirty years.

1. What were you doing when you were my age?

Twenty years old, I had joined the Jesuits two years previously, so I was just coming to the end of our noviciat and preparing to go on for college, where I studied chemistry and maths in UCD.

2. How did you get to where you are today?

Just by accident. The year before I was ordained a priest, I went to work in the inner city and I was working there with young people, that was a very clear need in the inner city at the time. Most young people were leaving school by the age of twelve, they were hanging around the streets, their parents were unemployed, so they had no money, they were getting into trouble with the law and they were going to jail, and it was as predictable as day follows night. We started working with young people in more traditional ways. We had a youth club and a craft center and we ran employment schemes, and we took them away on weekends and on holidays. As a result of that work, we became aware of a small number of young people, all boys at that time, who were sleeping rough. So as part of the service to young people we opened a hostel for six boys aged twelve to sixteen, who were sleeping rough. And I thought no more of it, that was to be our contribution to homelessness. Then the numbers started to grow, and the young people were leaving the hostel at sixteen and going back onto the streets because no services were available. So we opened a hostel for the over-sixteens, then we opened a hostel for the over-eighteens, then we had to open a second one, then the drug problem came, so we opened a drug detox center. Then the problem arose, what do homeless people do when they detox? Do they go back on the streets, or do they go back into hostels where drugs are in their face? So we opened two drug-free after care houses. More recently, the drug problem has changed, it’s become a much more chaotic drug problem, young people are now polydrug users, rather than single drug users, so we’ve opened a drug stabilization program to try and help them reach the point where they might be able to think of doing a detox. So one thing just lead to another, it was never my intention to spend thirty years working with homeless young people and drug users, it all just sort of happened.

3. Who was the most influential person in your life and why?

Well I think one of the important people was our own superior general in the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupe. Back in 1974, which was just the time when I was getting ordained, he set the Jesuits on a new path, in which justice was very, very central, and as a result of that, there was a new commitment to justice by the Jesuits, that spurred me to look at working in the justice area for the rest of my life, and it spurred the Jesuits to allow people like myself pursue that concern, which they did. So I’d say the fact that he lead the Jesuits on that new path was very important in terms of me reaching the point were I am. There were other individual Jesuits, who had been working away in this area, Fr. Michael Sweetman was one, who had been very vocal on the whole social justice area for a number of years. There were others who were very involved in poor deprived neighbourhoods, and they would have been an encouragement to me to go down this road and to stay on this road.

4. What do you value most in life?

For me the meaning of life, what I want my life to be about, is making a difference to other people, and if I have taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and therefore, I have forgone having a family, what I would like that to do is to free me to be able to go places and to do things that I couldn’t do if I had a family. And so, for me, I feel my meaning in my life and what gives me fulfillment is trying to make a difference in the lives of people who, if I weren’t there, it wouldn’t have happened. I was teaching for two years in a Jesuit school but I realized that if I wasn’t teaching there somebody else would take my place, and probably do it better, so I wasn’t needed in that sense, and so I decided to pursue this path where there were very few people doing it, very few people working with the homeless, with drug abusers at that time. I wanted to make a difference that if I didn’t do it, wouldn’t happen.

5. What advice would you give to a young university graduate from Northern Ireland/Ireland?

I think we have to challenge our own attitudes, first of all. I grew up, as most university graduates did, in a middle-class environment, with middle-class attitudes, and a middle-class, by and large, acceptance of the status quo. It was only when I started working with homeless young people, listened to their stories, saw the conditions in which they lived, saw the utter impossibility of them making anything constructive out of their lives in a society in which all the odds were stacked against them, that I began to question everything. I began to question what was happening in Irish society, how Irish society was structured by the better-off in order to protect their own interests. I challenged my values, I began to ask why a young person with a torn pair of runners goes in to Dunnes Stores and robs a pair of runners because he has no other way of getting a pair, why that is such an offence, when for me, the real offence is society putting that young person in that situation where he has to do that. For me that is a far greater offence. So it challenged everything about me, it challenged my values, my attitudes. It challenged my understanding of God, because my understanding of God and the understanding of God that most young people that I work with is a God of judgment and condemnation, and I came to reject that God, because these young people are very close to God, and yet they experience God as somebody who judges and condemns them, so there’s something wrong there. What I would say first of all, to most graduates, is that you have grown up in a particular context, in a particular environment, and with a particular set of attitudes and values. We need to challenge those. All of us need to challenge those, and it is through contact with people from a different context and a different environment, who can begin to help us to challenge those.

6. Have you seen a noticeable change in attitude from Irish people towards homelessness since you began your work in the inner city?

Homelessness when I started was a very small problem. It was a rather hidden problem, there were probably only one thousand homeless people in Ireland in 1974 when I started. Today there’s over five thousand, so it’s become a much bigger, more visible problem. I think there are two contradictory attitudes that I would come across. One is a great sympathy for homeless people, particularly younger homeless people, and there’s a great sense of “how can we allow people to sleep on the streets, surely we can do better for them than that in a country that is as wealthy as this”. And I would get that attitude from some people, from parents who would write to me and say “I have a young person that age, and I would hate to think of them sleeping on the streets, and I support what you’re doing and good luck to you”. The other attitude, which developed during the Celtic Tiger was, most middle-class people during the Celtic Tiger experience an increase in their standard of living, and an increase in their friends’ standard of living, and so there is a perception that if you didn’t benefit from the Celtic Tiger, it’s your own fault, you’re too lazy, the jobs were there, there’s plenty of jobs. If you were too lazy or too apathetic to bother trying to benefit from the Celtic Tiger, well it’s your own fault, so why should we bother trying to help you now. I think those two attitudes, which are very contradictory attitudes, I would experience a lot from different groups of people.

7. Do you see any promising approaches to the issues of homelessness and drug abuse in Irish politics at the moment, or do you think more radical action is needed?

I see absolutely no interest, or concern, in any of the political parties at the moment for the issues of homelessness and drug misuse. I could go on, story after story. To me, the policies that are there are token – tokenism. The services that are available are so hopelessly inadequate, that you couldn’t even begin to say they represent a serious effort on the part of the State to tackle homelessness or drug misuse, so I would be very critical, I couldn’t express how critical I am of the failure of the State to even bother being interested in the issues of homelessness or drug misuse. Admittedly they have spent a lot more money on those problems, because the money was available during the Celtic Tiger, but it was you spend what you have to spend, and you don’t give anything you don’t have to. You do what you can get away with, basically. No, I see no concern or interest, there are of course a couple of exceptions in the political area. But they are very much the exceptions, and they stand out because they are the exceptions.

8. What has been the most difficult decision you’ve had to make throughout your career?

There’s such an inadequacy of services that we have sometimes had to choose one target group over another target group. With the limited resources we have, one of our drug-free aftercare houses, we changed it into a stabilization program for chaotic drug users. Now I think those chaotic drug users need that program very badly, otherwise they’re going nowhere in life, except death. But it means that now people who are drug-free and who have come through a treatment program, we may have turn them away, and say I’m sorry, we don’t have a place for you, and you’re going to have to go back into hostels, and there’s going to drugs in your face every single night in the hostels, and you haven’t got a hope of staying drug-free while you’