"WE are breaking the cycle," says Ms Chris McCarthy. "We have hopes for our children to get second level education and maybe get into third level."
The cycle of limited education and limited chances in life is being attacked in a project supported by the Eastern Health Board and the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin's Liberties.
The Mercy Family Centre is located in an old school building in South Brown Street, opposite Saint Theresa's Gardens, an area where isolation, poverty and drugs are common.
Chris McCarthy was a pupil when it was a school but she left early. "The nun got me a job at 13. I thought it was great."
Now she thinks it was an injustice. The way she sees it, "they knew I wasn't going anywhere so I was pushed aside.
Today, thanks to the family centre in the very building which she thought she had left forever at 13, she is a student at University College Dublin. The school has long since closed but the Sisters of Mercy have made it available to house the family centre for over a decade.
"It has offered us a lifeline, says Ms McCarthy of the centre. "A lot of us here have done our Junior Cert. We did our literacy class and then our Junior Cert and we all got honours."
Today, "I am out at Belfield doing Women's Studies. Others have done community leadership courses."
UCD is now hoping to encourage more women from the Mercy Family Centre to do Women's Studies. "The college has approached the centre because I am the only one who is a working class person on the course. They say they will sponsor two of us to do the course free."
The centre, which has Ms Judith King as its first lay director, offers activities for children. These include a nursery, toddler's group, pre school playgroup and after school clubs. In return the children's mothers are asked to participate in at least some of the centre's courses. These cover everything from cookery to social analysis and from basic English to spirituality.
For the children it means the odds stacked against them in life are reduced a little. Children who have had pre school education usually settle down better in school.
For many mothers, taking part in the courses breaks down isolation. Many of the young mothers are from outside the area and have been given flats in Saint Theresa's Gardens or Chamber Street Flats.
As outsiders, they find it very hard to make contact with others. "I used to sit in the flat morning, noon and night," says Lorraine. "I didn't know anyone at all until I came down here."
For Sylvia, the centre's social analysis course "opened our eyes to so many things you wouldn't be aware of before."
At the last election, 60 women went to vote in a group to encourage others to use their vote and that was an outcome of the social analysis course, says Chris McCarthy. The centre has a strong social justice orientation and sees the promotion of social justice as a core aim.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most popular course in the centre, according to the women who spoke to us, is spirituality. Indeed, the centre has had to put on a second course to meet the demand for it.
This project receives 90 per cent of its funding from the Eastern Health Board - surely one of the its best investments in the long run. Raising the extra £16,000 or so is a hard task for a centre in an area of high unemployment and poverty and Judith King's ambition now is to persuade the board to provide 100 per cent funding.