'If I told you the number of people I've seen die' - Kilkenny homeless charity boss

Noel Sherry, CEO of Kilkenny's Good Shepherd Centre, says he slept outside all night to raise awareness of the daily realities for thousands of homeless people in the country right now.

"I decided we weren't interested in doing another fundraiser, because I think people are fed up with charities always looking for money. So, we decided that we would do an event to mark World Homeless Day," he explained.

"I thought there's probably no better way to raise awareness than to take 24 hours to do a sleep out. And I suppose some of the other reasons for doing it is because we've lost an awful lot of people to homelessness.

"I'm working in homeless services as a volunteer or as an employee for 41 years now and if I told you the number of people I've seen die, you know, it's very, very high. So, in a way, I want to remember them.

"And I suppose with the current numbers being 16,353, by Christmas that's going to exceed 17,000 if the same pattern continues. And it's very likely that the same pattern will continue."

READ NEXT: Famous faces expected in Kilkenny as hugely popular festival returns to city

Noel said that a key reason for homelessness is people being forced to move back home with families, often in overcrowded situations, and are unable to afford their own place which can cause tension and can lead to people being kicked out with no other options.

He also said that without appropriate public housing or accessible social housing or affordable social housing, people are falling into homelessness.

"You're hearing stories about children being stuck in hotels for four and five years, it's not great. Imagine having to do your homework or imagine having to study for your Junior Cert or your Leaving Cert in an ensuite. And imagine getting so annoyed with your siblings because they're making too much noise because you don't have the headspace," he said.

"Imagine the impact it's having on children's mental health....imagine that sense of loss. That sense of loss being taken away from their pets, taken away from their toys, taken away from their friends, potentially their school and their family. Children shouldn't be experiencing loss like that. And what we're seeing is a much greater number of children are reflecting this in terms of poor mental health.

"We've had children as young as eight and nine talking about being depressed or talking about self-harm or even suicide. And that's when you know something's gone really, really wrong. So really, really what I was doing that day was just trying to reflect some of that.

"And just saying that throughout that 24-hour period, we need change and we need change now."

Noel described the night he slept outside for World Homeless Day as "a very different experience," adding that "it became very empty, noises become like your senses, much more alert. You become a bit anxious or fearful.

"But for every minute I was there, I knew it was a minute closer to me getting home. So it was no way reflective of the experience of people sleeping rough. Because they don't know when it's going to end.

"So imagine how they deal with that time and how it actually can interrupt in terms of their skills, their functioning. When all they have to do is live in a time that's very empty and very, very fearful. And many, many people experiencing rough sleeping are in that terrible, terrible space.

"If there's two things I'd like to say is no child should be in a hotel or a B&B. And no one should be left to rough sleep. Because I think they're two of the most deplorable forms of homelessness. And they're happening every day in our country. And it's terrible," he continued.

Noel said that people had asked to do the sleep out with him but he wanted to do it alone.

"I wasn't going to have them sitting or sleeping out all night with me either. And I really just wanted to do it by myself because it was probably a slightly more personal thing. Because when you have all that time, you have time to think about people that you want to think about."

Noel said that at the start, "it was cold and I was asking, 'God, how am I going to put this time in? This is going to be slow. Oh God, oh God.' Your senses were up. You were hearing too much.

"You were hearing everything. You were seeing everything. Towards the end, I probably found myself becoming a little bit more emotional. One bit of me knew it was coming to an end and I was getting closer to it. But another bit of me
was like, every minute just seemed even ten times longer. Because of the anticipation of finishing."

Noel explained that while 16,354 people are registered as homeless in Ireland this figure only represents the people who are actually registered in emergency homeless accommodation.

"At the end of the day that doesn't include people rough sleeping and sofa-surfing or people and the younger generations who are forced to return home, even with their own families and they're forced to live in overcrowding," he explained.

"Nobody can tell you what the actual figure of the true housing need is. Because it surpasses local authority waiting lists, because that only collects one bit of information about one cohort of people. The actual number of people who are homeless could easily go somewhere between 35 and 40,000.

Noel finished with a strong statement on the current housing and homeless crisis in the country at the moment.

He said: "Do you know one of the biggest reasons why families come into homelessness today? It's not because of needing housing.

"It's because they've been evicted from private kinds of accommodation. They've returned home because they've had nowhere else to go. And then their relationship breaks down with their mother or their sister or their father and then they're forced into emergency accommodation.

"So we, inevitably, are allowing for relationships to become broken within families. And if you consider our constitution is built on the basis of the family, we don't show it very much respect, do we?"