When I was growing up it was quite common for a Beggarman or a Knight of the Road to wander into our kitchen at 9.00 or 10.00 at night, Winter or Summer. But they were more common in Winter time. We knew some of them by name, others by nickname only, like Tin Hat, others still by their first name only; others however became part of the extended family and they regularly doubled as baby sitters. One such trusted character was Paddy Cassidy. When Paddy arrived on the scene, the parents were free to go shopping or socialising to New Ross. This stranger presided for a few hours, keeping nine raucous children in order. These men were given mugs of tea, bread and jam. They were given space for the night in the loft over the old cow house. The only regulation these men had to observe was handing over the matches before retiring to bed. Our near neighbours, Kavanaghs, provided the same ‘service’, but on a bigger and more regular basis. We accepted these men as part of the landscape, part of our lives. I’m sure they were regular visitors to farm houses along the main road. Their origins or their destination was never mentioned.

Looking back now from the vantage point of fifty years, that world was a totally different world. I am not being nostalgic, I hope. It was a harsh world, an impoverished world, a world in which it was very easy to stigmatise an individual or a particular group. But hospitality to the stranger was taken as mandatory in that world. I think I looked upon them with a mixture of fear and excitement. They carried stories about what had happened on the road. Yet many of them were sufficiently strange to summon up fear filled shades in the soul of a young child. Even as young children we recognised that some of these men were quite mad. For example, Tin Hat wore an item akin to a lamp shade on his head and often screamed loudly as he walked the road. Yet we grew tremendously attached to them. I remember distinctly as children the great sorrow that descended on us when we learned that Smiley Thompson had been knocked down and killed by a car. Invariably, these men never spoke about themselves, either their history or their plans for the future. It was only in later life that any of us children managed to put their stories in context.

The place where I was reared in south Kilkenny was equidistant between two County Homes as we called them then, one in Enniscorthy and the other one in Thomastown. These institutions had been a legacy from the famine times, State sponsored centres of refuge for those who were evicted or rendered homeless in any way. They began then as an institutional response to an emergency. But, where the emergency ended, the institution lived on addressing other needs as they emerged in society. By the 1950s, the County Home was bad news. A stigma hung over it, a stigma that in the main was dealt with through silence. ’Ending your days in the County Home’ was the greatest disaster that could befall any person. I don’t think the stigma had any connection whatsoever with the care available there. The power of the stigma lay in history. And what of the characters who ignored that communal taboo, who shook their fists in defiance at the stigma? We are talking about the 1950s. I later learned that many of these Knights of the Road had served in the British Army and fought in the Second World War. None of these men would ever be integrated socially again. Other men like Tin Hat had obviously been entirely unhinged by the experience. Who knows what bombs still exploded in his troubled brain as he tramped the roads of south Kilkenny. So where did our house come into the story? Well, as I said, we were half ways between two stigmatized institutions. Like Elisha on the road to Shunem, a decision had to be made at the bottom of our lane: ‘Should I walk on another ten miles or, like Elisha in todays first reading, ‘retire to the upper room and lie down?’ Hospitality and welcome is so central to humanity. Not only our homes but our country too should be a place where strangers are welcome. Strangers can either draw out the best in us or the worst in us. They can either humanise us, or expose how dehumanised we have become. Nights of celebration and hospitality such as last night are every bit as central to Christianity as the Eucharist. In fact, if there is not a welcome for strangers in our hearts the Eucharist will be a contradiction.

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