Summerhill, Dublin.In Summerhill, Dublin, 104 young people have died from drug abuse in the past five years. "Drug abuse is almost inevitable for young people in this area. It's all around you. For the 12 to 18-year-olds there is always the danger of getting into trouble and getting into drugs because there is nothing else for them to do," says Chrissy Mangan, a community activist and mother with four children and two infant grandchildren. "You walk out the door and see kids walking around like zombies. They're the living dead. Some get gangrene and have legs amputated. Something needs to be done."
Ms Mangan's own son has abused drugs, has robbed cars and has been in and out of residential care. He told her that he began abusing drugs in St Patrick's. She became so frustrated when he was on the waiting list for one of the 10 beds in the detox programme in Cherry Orchard, that she consulted with detox experts and instigated her own at-home detox programme. She managed to get her son off heroin, but then discovered that he was using it again.
"Boys leave school at 15 and, with nothing else to do, hang around the street and get involved in drugs and crime. Girls hang around with nothing to do, and have babies. They talk about the X case and the C case, but I know of at least ten 14-year-old girls in this area who have become mothers. The priest said that two couples got married in the last year and 50 babies were christened," she says.
There was a riot in Summerhill in September 1996 when tenants attempted to evict suspected drug dealers. Ms Mangan believes that Concerned Parents made a difference and that since their marches and meetings stopped, drugs have been creeping back in again.
"There's a feeling that the police are doing nothing about the drugs problem. It's very frustrating when you are trying to clear the area of drug dealers and the police are protecting those that are selling drugs," she says.
Few young people in the area do the Leaving Cert and even fewer go on to third level education, she says. Ms Mangan's own daughter, Paula, got a certificate from Maynooth as a social entrepreneur in November, making her one of the few from the area to achieve at third level. "There was only one young fella in the whole area that ever went to TCD and that was years ago," says Ms Mangan.
"Our young people are not any less intelligent, it's just a question of opportunity," she adds. "It doesn't matter what qualifications you have - it is the area you live in." A community college would at least give an incentive to the young people of the area to do the Leaving Cert, she believes. A new community college planned for Sean McDermott Street was supposed to open this year, but has not even been built, she says. "We're used to broken promises. You have to fight for everything you have. You shouldn't have to keep fighting, but in this area you get nothing unless you do."
Ballinacurra, Limerick
In Ballinacurra, Co Limerick, children as young as 12 are using drugs and truancy is a huge problem, says Michael O'Mahony, a St Vincent de Paul volunteer. He cites the lack of stable, male role models and the absence of sports and recreational facilities as the main problems. Since St Mary's Park baths were knocked to the ground, kids swim in the sewerage pipes in the river.
Ballinacurra is an isolated, poor community where the politicians never bother to canvas because nobody votes, he says. "People feel powerless and there's a sense that they don't feel the have any say in what's happening," he says. The youth club has blocked-off windows like Fort Apache, the Bronx. "It almost challenges the boys by giving the message, `bet you couldn't break in'," he observes. People are beginning to try to get youth clubs and football clubs off the ground. "A woman is selling secondhand clothes in the market on Saturdays to try to raise funds for a youth project and then she hears the GAA get £20 million," he says.
Families have difficulty keeping children in school because there is no history of third-level education, which simply isn't seen as an option. Those who stay in school, struggle to do the Leaving. "Parents who are uneducated do not have the means to help children with difficult homework and they cannot afford, like middle-class parents can, to buy grinds," he says. Secondary-school students quickly get left behind their peers when they can't afford the books, school field trips, or the £20 fee for the Leaving. When they are left behind all the time, they start asking "what's the point?" Michael says.
Social exclusion makes young people angry and with no way to channel this anger, energy and drive, young people become self-destructive and turn to drugs and crime, he reasons. "We need to help them find a way to channel their great energy. What we need is a vision." The St Vincent de Paul is working one-to-one with young people, helping them to study, providing them with grinds and "taking them from the hurlyburly of the school ground into a safe environment where there is no bullying". The organisation is also trying to address the "huge lack of parenting skills" and to improve parents' abilities to cope with their teenage children. "If the current Government policy continues, there are vast areas of huge social deprivation which are going to go out of control. We need creative, visionary thinking and an overall strategy. Throwing money at the problem doesn't work. The Partnership 2000 programme, for example, looks fine on paper, but those who really need it are too disempowered to get involved."
North Clondalkin
There are 13 public housing estates in the North Clondalkin area, which includes Neilstown and Ronanstown, and the area has been targeted by the National Anti-Poverty Strategy. Unemployment is as high as 70 per cent in places, 25 per cent of households are one-parent families and the population under the age of 14 can tip levels of 40 per cent or more. A sign of the authorities' institutionalised attitude of neglect to the area is the fact that North Clondalkin has no office space - not even an ISDN line (a highspeed digital phone line for fax and computer use) for anyone who wants to set up an office or community initiative, says John Bennett, a community worker with the Community Development Project, one of 80 such projects funded by the Department of Social Welfare around the country. There are 15,000 people living in 3,500 homes, yet there is no bank and only one post office-cum-shop. Parents who need to do a big shop in Dunnes Stores must pay for child care or else bring all the children on the bus. There are no sports facilities and while there are some local youth clubs, the numbers they are able to cater for are very few.
After listing these major inadequacies - which are no fault of the people who live in North Clondalkin - he stresses the positive aspects of life in North Clondalkin, which boasts a new community centre. "It's not a dependency colony," he asserts. "North Clondalkin is a thriving human community with a myriad of local community organisations."
There is a local newsletter, The North Clondalkin Buzz, and "hundreds" of local football teams, youth clubs, childcare groups, residents and tenants groups and community development projects, he says.
In Estates On The Edge, Anne Power asserts that lone parenthood is a major destabilising influence on estates, but Bennett disagrees. Lone parent families are misunderstood and in his experience do not have any more problem children than two-parent families do. "There's a feeling here that the media does not respect disadvantaged groups. The media would not get away with saying things about bankers that they say about lone parents. Lone parents are trying to get to ways to become active in relation to personal development. We have a lone parents information project, particularly in relation to violence, which can be ongoing for some. "Lone parent families may be poor, but that does not mean they are not good, sound, functioning families. You don't have to have a man in the house to rear children properly. And poverty does not mean abuse or neglect. The vast majority of children of lone parents are not being neglected. Poorer parents are probably more conscious of the love and attention that children require than wealthy people."
The difficulties experienced by people in North Clondalkin are, he feels due not to the estates themselves but "to the bias within our socio-economic system towards people who have already rather than those who never had. . . There are choices being made about resources and areas like this constantly lose out. For years we were told Ireland was in recession; now Ireland has the money and it has decided not to do anything about poverty. The problems found in housing estates is a poverty issue, not a housing issue. You can't blame bricks and mortar."
Knocknaheeney, Cork
Knocknaheeney, on the north side of Cork City, has 300 houses with a high proportion of lone parents, teenagers and unemployed people. The St Vincent de Paul sees it as one of the areas of greatest need in the country.
Liam O'Callaghan, a volunteer who himself grew up on the north side of Cork city, says that children walking home from school have been killed by joyriders and that there is a serious drugs problem. He cites the stark evidence of Knocknaheeney's marginalisation: no buses after 8 p.m.; no direct bus service to third-level education (while there is for young people on the south side); no third-level institution and no community centre for Knocknaheeney's 40 flourishing community and sporting groups. The nearby Apple Computer factory draws most of the workers from the southside of the city, rather than Knocknaheeney, says Mr O'Callaghan. The north side has a grossly inadequate road structure for lorries and other large vehicles, which discourages development of further factories which might provide jobs.
People in Knocknaheeney are materially better off than they were 50 years ago thanks to welfare benefits, but there is a cultural poverty caused by isolation, ghettoisation and marginalisation, Mr O'Callaghan believes. "Cork is a tale of two cities, the best of times on the south side and the worst of times on the north side," he says.
When he compares life today in Knocknaheeney, an estate on a hill overlooking Cork Harbour, with his childhood in Shandon Street, he wonders why he and his family were happy in a cramped, four-roomed terraced house with a toilet in the shed, while people today with relatively larger houses, higher incomes and TVs - all paid for by social welfare - are unhappy. He traces the problem back to the creation of Knocknaheeney as an "artificial community" after the second World War. People of "a certain type" were brought from houses in the city to new houses on the hill. It was the time of the TB epidemic, and it was thought that people would be healthier in new, larger houses with indoor bathrooms and gardens in which to grow fresh vegetables. In hindsight, however, the move distanced people from the city's amenities and destroyed a sense of community. Liam recalls that as a youth he had many cultural and sporting facilities on his doorstep - such as cricket, fishing, the opera house, a choir in which Liam learned the music of Palestrina, hurling, soccer, the famous Sunnyside boxing club and a Shakespeare centre which nursed budding actors. Today the youths he visits in Knocknaheeney have none of these things. Over the years, Knocknaheeney became a "dumping ground" for people who failed to pay rent in public housing elsewhere in the city. "Because the population is all one sort of person, there's no upward motivation. They don't go for further education," he says. The solution, he thinks, is to demolish much of the north side and rebuild it as better balanced communities where, say, 70 per cent of the people are employed, educated and upwardly mobile and only 30 per cent are poor and uneducated. In Liam's childhood, the community around Shandon Street was mixed, which meant that "you could see successful people around so that there was a motivation to be employed. There were opportunities for uneducated youths, who could start out in unskilled jobs in an informal apprenticeship system. A father might have a connection which could lead to work for his son. Today, people in Knocknaheeney are disconnected from opportunity because they are ghettoised amongst other unemployed people. Even the outlet of emigration is closed to them, since today it is the educated, marketable young people who emigrate and leave the uneducated behind."
Cherry Orchard
Cherry Orchard, which includes the public housing estates of Gallanstown, Croftwood, Elmdale and Clover Hill, was built in 1983-86. Marion Doyle, a community worker there, says that 65 per cent of the 5,200 population is under 25. There is one shop. There is no school in Cherry Orchard and parents collectively pay a total of £4,500 per week to ferry kids to and from school. There is no doctor's surgery, no postbox, no public telephone. Unemployment levels vary throughout the area: in Gallanstown, unemployment is 80 per cent; in Clover Hill, it is 45 per cent.
Through a development company and negotiations with the Eastern Health Board and the Department of Education, "things are starting to happen", says Ms Doyle. A junior school which goes up to second class is being built. "It's a bit late in the day but it's a start," says Ms Doyle. An extension being built on to the Orchard Community Centre will house the youth clubs and the community development project, as well as a financial advice centre. The major issue in the area is the need for youth projects which would deal with issues surrounding childhood and adolescence. It is only a very small minority who cause anti-social behaviour, says Ms Doyle. She and others are trying to keep working against the stigmatising image of Cherry Orchard by developing positive projects for young people. "The children are our future and we have to make things happen for them," she says.
The Cherry Orchard Equine Project has received £1.5 million in backing over three years from the Government. The idea is to train early school leavers who love horses into working with horses as a career. The Eastern Health Board is developing two buildings side by side, one a family centre and the other a rehabilitation centre for children and young people become involved in drugs. The "children", as she calls them, who are smoking heroin will be detoxed at the hospital, then rehabilitated back on the estate. Parents hope that the availability of follow-up and support on the estate should greatly increase their chances of staying off drugs.
Despite the drugs problem, she remains optimistic: "There's a lot to be done in the area, but we're on the ball and we're not taking second best any more," says Ms Doyle.
