For You Are Beauty-Full

by Catherine Fenton

(Oak Tress Press, Cork, €14.99)

Peter Costello

The other week during one of the minor excitements around the Dáil, I watched a TV news crew make preparations on the steps of one of the houses in Molesworth Street to report live from the scene.

On the next door step, in the gathering gloom of the later afternoon, a young homeless man was already wrapped up in his sleeping bag, oblivious to the crisis going on around him and to the freezing weather. The news crew ignored him. For them he was not the ''breaking news'' of the moment.

That little scene encapsulates, for me at least, the ''homeless'' problem in Dublin. Many are hardly conscious any more of such figures as the young man. The 700-odd homeless folk in the city, who could easily be accommodated in some of those notoriously empty developments across the town, are no longer visible to many. When they are made visible, they are seen as a ''problem''.

This moving book, which is being sold in aid of the Simon Community in Cork, where much the same can be seen —or not seen by some, —deals not with the problem, but the people. For Catherine Fenton is focused not on a class of social deviants, but on individuals, with their own experiences their own stories, and as the title suggests, their own inner beauty.

The picture selected for the cover (illustrated here) captures much of the book's feeling. Here the human touch is clearly paramount, the human touch so often seen as lacking when grand schemes are proposed by central government (we have little real local government these days).

Catherine Fenton is a Presentation nun in the Douglas Street convent in Cork. She has been working with her ''friends on the streets'' since 1994. She is a reminder, when so many pages of our papers are filled with abuse of religious, of the real task of the Christian in the modern world.

The Gospels are quite clear about this, and no theology, no fine rituals, no carefully preserved hierarchy of power can take away from the common task of all: ''When, Lord, did I visit you in prison?''

The homeless are in a sense imprisoned in the streets they live on. There seems to be no way out and they have to make the best of it in any way they can, with a little help from true and respecting friends such as Sr Catherine. We all saw at Christmas those now traditional TV scenes of the poor and the homeless being fed. But they have to be fed on all the other days of the year too. Because they are not always visible, they do not cease to be human.

Since the great crash many priorities in our society have been questioned. Certainly one has to wonder if our use of resources, of skills or people has over recent years been wise. The clashing contrast between these conversations recorded in this book, which seem to go to the heart of the human condition, are in shocking contrast to the prancing antics of Jedward and other celebrities.

Buying a copy of this wonderfully touching, human and loving book will go a little towards aiding those whose lives it deals with. But beyond the streets of Cork and Dublin, far beyond the TV cameras and the crisis of the moment, there remains all those others, sad, lonely, often lost.

When the political sensations of the day so often rising from personal conceit and greedy ambition have been forgotten, the homeless ''problem'' remains. The news cameras move on, the sleeping youth remains.

(The publishers can be reached at info@oaktree press.com; LoCall 1890 313855.)