Laois volunteers all set to collect Electric Picnic sleeping blankets

Volunteers from Portlaoise Action To Homelessness(PATH) are planning to collect leftover sleeping bags at the Electric Picnic on Monday.

PATH committee member Catherine Bennett said the charity, which helps homeless people and those in need in Laois and Dublin, collected around 500 sleeping bags at the event last year and 1,200 the year before. 

“We have a volunteer list so we put out word to them. We fill out a form to make sure we get in,” she explained. 

Ms Bennett said the volunteers are given a couple of hours to collect sleeping bags before the bulldozers arrive to clear the festival campsites. 

She said around nine or ten volunteers are allowed two to three hours to collect as many sleeping bags as they can. She recalled thinking “it was like Beirut” on her first visit to the post Picnic campsites. 

Ms Bennett said the sleeping bags are a “bonus” at this time of year and will be distributed to homeless people, primarily in Dublin, who PATH help on a regular basis. 

While 500 may sound like a lot of sleeping bags, Ms Bennett  revealed the charity distributed far more in recent months. 

“In the last four months I would say we have got through 900 new ones that we buy,” she explained. 

She said the vast majority of the charity users she meets are Irish. The charity hands out meals and parcels in Dublin but also in Portlaoise. 

“There is the best of people up there. We have people coming up to us in suits. They pay the rent and they have no money left,” she said. 

Ms Bennett said the charity is getting very busy and they are seeing a rise in the number of families seeking assistance. She admitted she found it difficult to see  young children caught in such hardship. 

“We are very, very busy at the moment which is not a good thing but it is good to help them,” she said. 

On Thursday, August 22,  the volunteers bring the sleeping bags to the Laois Shopping Centre in Portlaoise where local people can collect them and bring them home to be washed and dried. 

PATH usually put out an appeal up on their social media and invite people to help out. The system is in place for a number of years and works well. 

The following Thursday, people who cleaned the bags will be asked to return them to the PATH volunteers at the shopping centre. 

PATH will have the Electric Picnic sleeping bags ready to be washed at Laois Shopping Centre on Thursday, August 22 from 6pm to 7pm.