What would I know about poverty, as an ex-Belvederian, retired, middle-class community pharmacist? Not a lot, thank God, but what I do know is that the absence of spouse, partner, family friends or good neighbours can be the making of awful poverty.

As a young student in the mid-fifties whilst with the Jesuits, we had our own conference of Saint Vincent de Paul and it was our job once a week to make visits in pairs to the neighbouring slums.

Just picture the scene of teenage middle-class boys awkwardly knocking on the doors of old Georgian tenement flats. We were always met courteously, mostly by mothers of big families and I can’t remember calling on anyone who lived alone. We dispensed vouchers for fuel and food, which as far as I remember, were in the region of thirty shillings.

What I do remember vividly to this day was the smell one would expect from an uncovered communal WC used by perhaps thirty people. All this was maybe forty years after Sean O’Casey captured these scenes in his plays.

The plus side of these visits for me was that I saw active communities, people who looked out for one another. Now, two generations on, the scene has changed dramatically– loneliness! That famous fireman Willy Bermingham did not live long enough to see the great results of his work, a lot done a lot more to do.

Sandymount has had a good name for looking out for our neighbours. This was recognised in the heydays of community week, but that is all of twenty years ago and people have become very busy, real or imaginary, and have so much less time, “must dash now, talk to you.” To be fair, visible poverty of a material kind is virtually gone in Sandymount.

Quite apart from such organisations as Saint Vincent de Paul, this country has seen wonderful improvements in social welfare services and if we can qualify for benefits without being excluded by some clause in the small print overleaf.

I remember a well known character in Sandymount callled Billy Ferris. “Hi ye Billy,” says I. “I haven’t got a bob and I am the happiest man in the world,” Billy would reply. I doubt if Billy was every lonely.

But I remember too a bank manager’s widow whose only child had gone overseas, sitting in the front room looking out of her lace curtain in the hope that someone might call– sometime – anybody?

Picture: An eviction from a condemned Georgian tenement in York Street in 1964.