RÓISÍN INGLE BEING THERE:From the age of six, Deirdre was taught to beg, but it was a trip to Dublin at 18 that changed her life and led to a heroin addiction. Now 20, she wants one chance to start her life
SOMETIMES THE streets of Dublin go blank. That's when Deirdre does most of her thinking. She will be sitting there begging, beside an ATM, or outside a fast-food outlet, or hunched up against a phone box near St Stephen's Green. All of a sudden, the stream of people passing will dwindle to nothing. At times like this, when there's nobody around to ask for money, Deirdre retreats inside her head. "When the street goes blank, I go on this mad thinking buzz," she says.
Deirdre (not her real name) thinks about everything. The damp patch on her sleeping bag; the friendly man who makes her laugh and gives her a fiver. She thinks about being homeless in the capital and living in Caretakers, the Focus Ireland hostel for "hard to place" young people. She thinks about why this happened to her and she wonders whether anything will ever change. Mostly, though, she thinks about her childhood. She's only 20, so it's not all that long ago and the memories are fresh.
She remembers one day in particular. It might have been her sixth birthday, or maybe it was her seventh. She was back in the caravan site in Finglas, where she grew up and was taught to beg door-to-door as soon as she could walk and talk. As usual, her parents were somewhere else, but her older sister had managed to collect enough pennies to buy a packet of crisps for each of them. This was her party. Happy birthday, Deirdre. It's strange, she says, but she thinks about that day a lot.
Her mother and father were mostly fighting with each other or drinking in town. "They didn't care about us, they didn't look after us," she says, lowering heavy lids over hazel eyes. When she was eight years old, they split up for good. That's when the social workers came to the caravan. Each of the seven children was sent to a different foster home. Most ended up in Dublin, but Deirdre was sent to a family in Midleton, Co Cork.
"At first, I was pure uncomfortable, but after a few months I settled in and I liked living there," she says. "I went horseriding with the daughter of the family, it was good. After a few years, I was moved on. That's what happens. I was put in a foster home for Travellers but I didn't like it. Then I was in hostels and sleeping rough. A few years ago, my three brothers came down from Dublin to see me. They looked so great. I decided to go back up to be with them," she explains.
Coming to Dublin at 18 is one of her biggest regrets. Another is that night in a city-centre graveyard, when she saw her brothers smoking heroin for the first time. "They were doing it behind a headstone. I was shocked for about half an hour, but then I asked for some. When I took it, I felt good," she says. "Now, the heroin has my life wrecked. It stops you feeling and takes the good out of everything. You don't enjoy life. All you think about is getting enough money for another bag. Your life is tapping for money, then buying a bag, getting more money, then buying more, and it just goes on like that, until I go to Caretakers to sleep, but in the morning it starts again."
One of her brothers died five months ago, a few days short of his 21st birthday, after falling into the Liffey river. The rest of the family are scattered around the place. Her 13-year-old sister is doing the best of all of them. "I hear she is, anyway. I don't want her to see me like this. But I might get her number and just talk to her on the phone. I don't want to see her until I have sorted myself out," she says.
DEIRDRE HAS CLEAR skin and long dyed-blonde hair, pulled into a neat ponytail. Her jacket is washing-powder white, her jeans blue and her belt sparkly. You can't help thinking she looks healthier than most heroin addicts.
"In the whole time I've been using, I've only lost two stone. That's not normal, most of them lose their appetite because of the gear, they look real skinny, like they are about to die," she says. Heroin or no heroin, she has the appetite "of a greyhound"; her whole family always did. She takes second or even third helpings whenever she gets free meals.
"You'll never go hungry in Dublin, so that's something anyway," she says.
There are evening meals and big bowls of rice pudding for breakfast in Caretakers, where we meet. She is homeless, but this temporary accommodation, a joint Focus Ireland and St Vincent de Paul initiative which opened four years ago, is the closest thing to a home she has.
The staff are led by Noel Sherry, a self-described "big tough bugger" and a Belfast man, who Deirdre respects. "Noel's great. I love all the staff here; if it wasn't for them, and for this place, we'd have nowhere to go," she says.
That said, she sometimes lashes out in frustration with the rules. You can't smoke in the nine bedrooms here, and you can't use heroin on the premises.
But this is a low-threshold facility, and the worst that will happen when rules are broken is that clients will be barred for one or two nights.
In the course of a year, Focus Ireland will come into contact with around 700 young people under the age of 25, and more than 5,000 homeless people. Caretakers provides services to around 70 clients in that time. These are the hardest homeless to reach, drug users between 16 and 21 who are in extreme crisis. The staff includes those who work in the hostel and an outreach team, who access people on the streets, providing links with the services, and practical help, such as warm gloves or sleeping bags. While sleeping rough is the most visible form of homelessness, those on the streets make up only a small percentage of people without a home. Emergency accommodation services can bring more stability to the lives of the homeless, linking them up with detox services and more permanent housing options. They offer hope in otherwise hopeless situations.
A typical Caretakers case might be a 17-year-old whose home life has broken down because of drug use or dysfunctional behaviour. Or a teenager, such as Deirdre, who has been in care for most of her life and ended up on the streets because of her lifestyle. Caretakers, explains Noel, works to minimise the impact of a child entering adult homeless services, or to remove the risk of this happening altogether.
"At the most basic level, what we are doing is harm reduction, looking after their emotional and practical needs, keeping them alive, and keeping them in touch with all the services available to them," he says. "They are typical teenagers. They have the same needs. Apart from all the other chaotic stuff that is going on, they are still very much in that teenage place between feeling ugly and beautiful. They can have rows with us, fall out with us, assault us, but they keep coming back and we keep encouraging them to come back, because hopefully they will eventually make progress."
IF DEIRDRE COULD wave a magic wand over her life, what would she wish for? "That's simple," she says. "I just want my own place. I want someone to give me even one chance and, if I mess it up, then I swear they can kick me out straight away. Ask anyone, all I've wanted since I was 15 was a flat. I wouldn't mess it up; I know I wouldn't. I wouldn't use heroin. I'd get off it.
"There's a man in Focus Ireland trying to help get me on a methadone programme. I will get new friends, not so-called friends who never tell me to give up the gear, who only want to know when I am getting the price of the next bag. I can look after the flat and do it up and pay the rent, but nobody can do that unless you give them a chance in the first place."She goes quiet for a moment, with nothing left to say.
Deirdre will turn 21 in a few months. She won't have access to Caretakers any more and she doesn't want to access adult homeless services, because she thinks so many women end up "on the game and pregnant" with what she calls "babies from a thousand fathers".
Noel Sherry says this period, before coming of age, can often be a turning point for his young clients. "The prospect of going into adult services can sometimes wake the young person up a bit. They might start to want something different, it can be a time when significant progress can be made," he says.
As she approaches this milestone, Deirdre says she has been having bad dreams. They are about vampires, mainly. She told a priest, and he told her that people only dream of vampires when their body and soul is being ripped out of them. Deirdre says that's what the heroin is doing to her. She has other dreams, though. Of that flat. A big win on the Lotto. A holiday in Spain. She laughs then, because she has never been on a train, a boat or aircraft in her life.
She needs to go out now, to get money for heroin, because soon the withdrawal symptoms will start. The pounding head, the muscle-twitching, the runny nose, and what she calls "the madness".
"When you get like that, you do mad things, approaching people you don't know for drugs. But I've never robbed anyone, and I never will," she says.
Walking away from Caretakers, she shows you the shortcut over to St Stephen's Green, chatting chirpily about getting off heroin and finding work as a waitress some day. "I just want one chance," she repeats, settling on a spot next to an ATM off Grafton Street, pulling her damp sleeping bag around her, hand outstretched in the rain.
She doesn't say it, but she suddenly seems tired of talking and, anyway, you know you are cramping her style. Tapping is a solo pursuit and it's all she's focused on now. So you tell her you are going, and, as the street goes blank for a moment, she might be anywhere. Back in Finglas on her birthday or behind a gravestone with her brothers. She nods then, eyes closed. And you walk away.
Focus Ireland is one of Ireland's leading housing and homeless charities and works to combat and prevent homelessness through service provision, housing and advocacy. The charity provides a home for more than 500 households in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Sligo.
