Home >
More than 50 years of Cork Simon Community
It all began in 1971 with a phone call to Eamonn Murphy here in Cork from Anton Wallich-Clifford in London.
A small group of volunteers who cared about the extent of homelessness in Cork in the early seventies were keen to put something in place to help.
Anton was a probation officer working in London in the fifties and sixties. He recognised the need for a new and radical approach to tackling homelessness because of the sheer number of people of No Fixed Abode he was meeting. A significant number of them were Irish. He founded the Simon Community.
Here in Cork, as Eamon recalls, “There were several phone calls between myself and Anton Wallich-Clifford – very quickly and without any warning, he sent over six Simon workers to Cork. It was with their help that we managed to get Simon operating, but it was up to us to fit Simon into an Irish context.”
Guided by Anton and Simon Community values, the volunteers began a regular count of the number of people sleeping rough in the city.
Eamon recalls the first Cork Simon service: “The very first activity that we got going in Cork was soup runs. It wasn’t just a bowl of soup; it was human contact. It was conversation and these people had the expectation that somebody was actually interested in them.”
It’s a service that has operated every night since. It was soon followed by our first emergency shelter on John Street – long since demolished.
Brendan Ryan, one of our early day volunteers recalls his time in that first shelter: “The atmosphere was wonderful and warm.”
“But you would never want to romanticise it – this was an awful place. Made good by good people and by the extraordinary resilience of the Simon residents.
It was absolutely impossible to accommodate 40 people and do it properly and the solution was the site in Anderson’s Quay.”
Good people. Extraordinary resilience. Wonderful and warm. Qualities that continue to prevail throughout our community today.
Anderson’s Quay is now home to our emergency shelter, day services, soup run and more. We’ve grown and changed in response to the constantly changing nature of homelessness. We now offer homelessness prevention services, affordable housing and a range of specialist services.
But we’ve remained grounded in what motivated our founding volunteers.
The decades haven’t separated us, we remain linked through time through our common values.
We’ve been blessed with incredible support through the years. The tireless work of our volunteers, the generosity of our donors and the backing of our partners have all brought us to where we are today – helping to change the lives of over 1,000 people every year.
We are a community of people that cares about homelessness, cares about the men and women experiencing homelessness and cares about making Cork and Kerry a better place for all.
“When I look back at that time in my life, I think I got as much out of the service I offered to people. I was looking for a sense of belonging somewhere and a sense of community and I met the right people along the way. I’m very thankful for having had that experience.” Mirjam who came from the Netherlands to Cork Simon as a volunteer for nine months in 1988, remembers her time here as life changing.
We’ve come a long way since 1971, but our core mission remains the same: a community dedicated to helping people find their way home.
From that first phone call until now, our values of Community, Commitment to Care, Diversity, Inclusion, Social Justice and Voluntarism are at the heart of everything we do.
Fifty Faces of Cork Simon
Over fifty Years in the making, decades in the refining. Those fifty-plus bring perspective and clarity; hardening our purpose and resolve, our sense of do or die: ending the nightmare of homelessness for every man and woman turning to us for help.
To mark our 50th anniversary, we created Fifty Faces of Cork Simon – to represent the thousands of men and women who make us what we are: people believing in people, shaping dreams into reality. Their words, their stories, our experience.
Come on in – a history of Cork Simon Community
Cork author, Monica McNamara has written, ‘Come on in – a history of Cork Simon Community’. The book offers an insight into everyday life in the first emergency shelter on John Street which was open from 1972 to 1996. Former ‘workers’ in Cork Simon, many of whom worked full-time in a voluntary capacity, contribute to evocative portraits of the men and women experiencing homelessness here in Cork.
Get your copy of ‘Come on in – a history of Cork Simon Community’ in our online store. All proceeds go to Cork Simon Community.
