Photographs capture Christmas morning for the homeless in Belfast city centre
While most of Northern Ireland was still asleep, or waking up in a warm house to presents and festive happiness, a photographer was out and about in central Belfast.
David McConnell went looking for homelessness in the heart of Belfast on December 25.
Between 7am and 9am he snapped a series of images to capture their plight.
“This is maybe the last couple of homeless,” he said of the two people he found sleeping out. Then he added: “Put it this way, it was the only two I could find in the city centre and Belfast City Hall under a new dawn, the last December 25 dawn of the twenty teens.”
Mr McConnell said: “Two of the photographs clearly show homeless people sleeping on the street, and please note you can not see who they are, just a rough idea where they were on the night of December 24/25.”
Of the other two photographs, one shows where a person was sleeping and the other appears to show where someone put their sleeping bag into a public phone box, perhaps to keep it dry.
Mr McConnell also took a pre-dawn photograph of a deserted Donegall Place, looking towards Belfast City Hall (pictured top) ahead of what was a sunny start to Christmas Day in Belfast.