Birmingham Irish charity launches striking summer homelessness appeal
SIFA Fireside, a support service for people experiencing homelessness, is calling on the public not to forget those in need during the summer holidays.
SIFA Fireside's latest advertising campaign launched this month
'It's an unfortunate truth that while the festive season often inspires acts of kindness towards vulnerable people, the same cannot always be said for the months when the weather is warmer, especially when we're in the middle of a heatwave,' a spokesperson for the charity said.
The organisation has partnered with the Birmingham creative agency One Black Bear, to launch a compelling campaign for summer 2025 which is an extension of their 'Homelessness Doesn't Take a Holiday' fundraiser of 2023.
'During summer, many individuals tend to overlook the plight of people struggling for housing, as if homelessness seems less significant when the sun starts shining,' they said.
'As a result, donations to SIFA Fireside dry up in summer, making it even more challenging for them to continue their vital work supporting those who need it the most.'
They added: 'These donations are desperately needed for unrestricted funding to help keep the Homeless Intervention Service going.'
Robb Sheppard, who is Communication Manager at SIFA Fireside, said their latest campaign is 'another powerful and thought-provoking idea by One Black Bear'.
'Hopefully it will stop people in their tracks, encourage them to take a second look, and make a donation,' he added.
The organisation is driving awareness of summer homelessness
'These donations will make a big difference to the day-to-day lives of our city's most vulnerable people.'
Jon Harrison, Creative Partner at One Black Bear said they were 'delighted to continue helping SIFA raise awareness of their essential work supporting people facing homelessness in our city'.
'Building on our 'Homelessness doesn't take a holiday' campaign theme, this year's creative really helps draw attention to the conditions experienced by those facing homelessness throughout Birmingham and beyond, while the rest of us enjoy our trips abroad,' he added.
'If you're able to support SIFA by donating, please do."
Visit sifafireside.co.uk/holiday for more information.
See More: Birmingham, Homelessness, Irish, SIFA Fireside
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RTÉ News
2 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Inside the social networks behind Irish myths and legends
Analysis: Maths and network analysis can help to track connections between hundreds of characters in Irish mythology By Pádraig MacCarron and Gaëlle Clion, University of Limerick Most of what are often considered as Irish myths are preserved in early modern and medieval manuscripts, attesting of a long-standing Irish literary tradition from at least the 9th century onwards. These texts contain the familiar stories of Cú Chulainn and the fight on the ford, and Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna to name a few. But there are thousands of characters contained in these narratives. Most approaches to the study of this corpus of narratives is done qualitatively. With this many characters in hundreds of narratives, though, it can be challenging for scholars to keep track of the plethora of minor characters. This is especially so given the lack of details surrounding them in many of these stories, as well as the evolution of characters' names over time. From RTÉ Brainstorm, 5 things you didn't know about Fionn mac Cumhaill A relatively recent approach to studying systems of many interacting entities is that of network analysis. A network is simply a collection of objects that have some connections between them. In a social network for example, these objects represent people, and two people are connected if they interact. Networks of mythological characters have been analysed for over a decade at this stage. The narrative of Táin Bó Cúailgne ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley"), tells of Cú Chulainn's defence of Ulster from an invasion led by Connacht's queen Medb (Maeve in modern spelling) and her husband Ailill who are attempting to steal a prized bull. This story, whole or incomplete, is found in many manuscripts (the oldest from around the 11th or 12th century) and the older version (recension) contains over 500 characters with almost 1,000 interactions between them. From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, the late poet Thomas Kinsella reads an extract from The Táin Measuring the importance of characters in a social network can be done in a few ways. The simplest is to measure a character's number of connections. For example, in the Táin, Cú Chulainn has the highest number of connections (209) and Conchobar mac Nessa the second highest (141). However, some important characters may not always have a high number of connections. A better measure is the betweenness centrality. This measures how many shortest paths in a network a character is on. If, for example, a message was passing through the network, then it would be more likely to pass through characters with a high betweenness making them important for the flow of information. When expanding this analysis to 38 narratives, by including other stories from the so-called Ulster cycle, the network increases to over 1,000 unique characters and over 2,200 interactions. The top characters by betweenness on this network, as shown below, are Cú Chulainn, Conchobar, Ailill, Fergus mac Róich and Medb. As minor characters appear in more narratives, their centrality in the network increases. For example, Macha, a supernatural character after whom Armagh (Ard Mhacha) is named, only interacts with 18 other characters in this network, but she is the eighth most influential character when measured by betweenness. Similarly, The Mórrigán, sometimes said to be a goddess associated with war, has only nine connections, but is the 19th most central character in the network. The supernatural characters tend to tie different narratives together. While generally not major characters, they appear in different times to different characters. Our hypothesis is that as we expand the dataset by increasing the number of narratives we analyse, the mystical characters associated with the Tuatha Dé Dannan will become more influential in the network. As fascinating as they are, supernatural characters are not our only focus. As the network is expanded, other minor characters will prove more or less central, which will help gain a new perspective on their importance in the literary tradition of the Ulster cycle. From UL's Faculty of Science and Engineering, Dr Pádraig MacCarron on Ireland's most influential gods and heroes We will also be able to assess the evolution of character interactions over time, by comparing the networks obtained for the older narratives with the early-modern versions. Since different parameters can be selected when generating the network, it presents a variety of uses when studying this corpus of text. For instance, we will be able to gather a network of female characters, shedding new light on their roles and positions in these texts. Beyond this, a further motivation from a mathematics perspective is to measure the effect of information loss. We know that there are many missing narratives, sometimes we have just their names, other times fragments of narratives, and possibly many we know nothing of at all. Hence, a newly discovered manuscript could uncover a previously unknown tradition, a lost narrative, or just repeat narratives already recorded. We can simulate the effect of information loss on the major characters, by randomly removing some of the narratives, reconstructing the social network, and comparing how often the main characters remain. Running this 200 times, and even removing half of the narratives, most of the time four of the top five characters are unaffected. This indicates, that at least if more narratives are discovered, we're unlikely to have new major characters affecting the Ulster cycle. This is preliminary work on the Networks of Early-Modern, Medieval & Ancient, Irish Narratives (NEMAIN) project funded by Research Ireland. This project reveals how scholars from humanities and the sciences can open new avenues of inter-disciplinary research and shed new light on ancient material.
RTÉ News
2 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Pray For Our Sinners: Sinead O'Shea's tale from the resistance
The most-watched documentary at Irish cinemas in 2023, Pray for Our Sinners documents filmmaker Sinéad O'Shea's return to her hometown, Navan, to explore the impact of the Catholic Church on the community in decades past - watch it now via RTÉ Player. As Pray For Our Sinners makes its RTÉ debut, Sinéad O'Shea revisits her film and explores how she 'wanted to show how Ireland had worked as I was growing up'. For some Irish people there has been enough said already about the activities of the Catholic Church. I understand. I grew up in the countryside outside Navan, then a small town in the midlands, in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time I was in secondary school, the scandals involving the Catholic Church had begun to emerge, and later I worked on some of them for The Guardian, BBC Newsnight, The New York Times and Al Jazeera English. It was this familiarity which inspired me to make Pray for Our Sinners. An old schoolfriend, Sinéad Burke, had told me about some of the work undertaken by a husband and wife doctor team in Navan. I knew this could be a different film. Watch the trailer for Pray For Our Sinners Over decades, I would later discover, Dr. Paddy and Dr. Mary Randles had fought against corporal punishment, rescued young women from mother and baby homes and opened a family planning clinic. Along the way they faced opposition from within the town, led by a beloved local priest, Fr. Farrell. A story of resistance from Ireland in this era is novel in itself but there was more to it than that. I wanted to show how Ireland had worked as I was growing up; how the informal hierarchies operated, how the threat of marginalisation was so frightening for us all. We began development filming in lockdown. Dr. Paddy had passed away in 2017 and I had spent time chatting with Dr. Mary about her husband's work. The release of the mother and baby home report in 2021 prompted her to discuss her own memories too and we decided to find some of the people she had helped. This became our film. From a logistical point of view, production was difficult but our participants; Dr. Mary, Betty, Edna and Norman were exceptional. I wanted to honour the quietness and modesty of life then. As I say in the film, it was considered American to complain when I was growing up, and to be honest, I'm still a bit conflicted about this. At its best, Catholicism suggests there are bigger forces at work than one's own concerns and there is sanctuary, I think, in this belief. A story of resistance from Ireland in this era is novel in itself but there was more to it than that. In practice of course, it often meant that vulnerable voices were overwhelmed by the fears and desires of more powerful individuals but times were not always all bad. It felt important to achieve a balance, to ensure the film didn't feel anti-Catholic and to acknowledge the sense of community provided by the Church. my friend @SineadEOShea has made a film, 'pray for our sinners', about some people in her home town of navan who stood up against the social control of the catholic church at a time when most of us still felt it prudent to keep our heads down. — Ken Early (@kenearlys) May 7, 2023 Many of the real harms caused by Catholicism were also facilitated by the State and I wanted to emphasise that some big questions are still unanswered. At Sean Ross mother and baby home, for instance, 1090 babies died but nearly all their remains are "missing." It was important to me that people in Navan did not feel undermined. Urban middle classes tend to condescend to those from rural or religious backgrounds. There was great nuance and humour in small town life as I was growing up and I wanted to celebrate that. We finally finished the edit in May 2022 and I sent it off to the Toronto Film Festival. It had already been rejected as a rough cut from other much less high profile festivals so I was astonished when it was selected. Our world premiere was held in September, three weeks after I gave birth. We then embarked on a tour of US festivals after that, winning Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival and were nominated for awards in Chicago and Washington DC. The big test though, would be our screenings at home. We had our Irish premiere in the Dublin Film Festival with Dr. Mary, Ethna, Norman and Betty in attendance. I think everyone there will remember it. The cinema was so crowded that some sat on the floor. There was weeping but also laughter. At one point, as Mary gave vent to her feelings onscreen, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Afterwards there were two standing ovations for our stars. It was so genuine, people just wanted to express their admiration. Listen: Dr. Mary Randles and Sinead O'Shea talk to Dearbhail McDonald Our distributors, Break Out, scheduled a cinema release for late April. We were a little concerned that people might not want to see another film about our Catholic past but we hoped the emotion of our Dublin screening might inspire new audiences to come. We showed first in Navan and this too was an event with great meaning, I think, for both locals and our participants in particular. Their stories, they said, had been told properly, and now they felt seen and affirmed by their community. As Dr. Mary observed of Norman, "he seems to walk a little taller around the town." Despite all our worries, there has been an overwhelming response to the film. It is the most attended documentary in Ireland this year and is continuing to screen at festivals around the world. It will soon be broadcast on television around Europe. Dr. Mary and I were even invited to the Oireachtas for a screening there. This left us both feeling a little strange afterwards. Politicians had their photos taken with us but some of them subsequently voted for the deeply flawed mother and baby home redress scheme which has omitted nearly 50% of the survivors. Now the film will be released on digital platforms in Ireland and the UK, and will find a new audience there. I hope it inspires some reflection on where we came from, and where we are now. It's not hard to join a fashionable cause when that's what everyone else is doing but Mary, Betty, Ethna and Norman took real risks in a much less forgiving context. As the film concludes, there is always a way to resist.
Sunday World
2 hours ago
- Sunday World
Funeral details announced for Roscommon woman who died while swimming in Donegal
Máire Murray had been swimming when she got into difficulty. The funeral of a Roscommon woman who died after getting into difficulty while swimming in County Donegal will be held later this week. Máire Murray, formerly of Harold's Cross, Dublin and Croghan Road, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Roscommon, had been swimming at Glencolmcille, Co Donegal on Friday, August 1, when she got into difficulty in the water. Gardaí were alerted to the incident shortly after 7pm. Ms Murray, who was in her 50s, was airlifted to Sligo University Hospital where she was pronounced deceased a short time later. Máire Murray. News in 90 Seconds - Aug 7th It is believed Ms Murray was in Glencolmcille attending Oideas Gael, the Irish language college, when the incident occurred. Ms Murray's funeral mass will take place on Friday, August 8, 2025 in Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Harold's Cross Dublin at 12 noon followed by cremation at Mount Jerome crematorium. The family has requested family flowers only and donations if desired to the RNLI. Ms Murray has been remembered as 'the loveliest person' with a 'ready smile and dry wit'. Former President Mary McAleese and her husband Martin were among those who paid tribute to Ms Murray. "We send our deepest condolences to all Maire's family on her very sad passing. "She was a sister student at Oideas Gael and so happy to be there as were we all until that fateful Friday when the sea took her so cruelly as she took her last swim of the week. "It could so easily have been any one of us for the beach is so beautiful and so tempting despite its occasional dangers. "The fantastic rescue teams by air, sea and land along with the comforting help of the local community and staff at Oideas Gael and the folk village will stay long in the memory of all who were there. "And Máire will be remembered with great fondness and grief too. Ar dheis De go raibh a anam uasal.' Ms Murray is pre-deceased by her parents Joe and Nancy and sister-in-law Sylvia. Ms Murray is survived by her sister Catherine [Kate] (Dublin), brothers Tomás (USA) and Kevin (Cork), sister-in-law Allie, nephew Tom, nieces Anna, Alice and Lily, her very wide circle of friends, extended family, neighbours and colleagues at St Michael's Hospital, Dún Laoghaire.
