Creative shelter for one elderly man in Dublin is no pipe-dream

It's only in the last while that Maurice Ryan (66) has been able to do a few things with his Blackrock home. Since he moved in last October he's built a gable wall and put in a front door. He's even created a little spot where he can make a fire.

This is not the Celtic Tiger DIY dream. Maurice lives in an abandoned sewerage pipe beside Booterstown Bird Sanctuary in Co Dublin.

A bleak February afternoon finds him sitting in the pipe, his arms wrapped about his knees, amid cushions, a sleeping bag and a grubby white blanket. Two small, battered saucepans are pushed up against one side, a few clothes further back and plastic bags along the other. "I've been living here since sometime last year," he says, having first lain out a jumper for me to sit on and told me to make myself comfortable.

"But you know I'm actually German," he says cheerfully. "Yes, I'm here [in Ireland] a long time. I came here as a refugee when I was a young child, in 1945. I'm not sure exactly what age I was when I came here, about 9 or 10. I lived with Mary and Michael Ryan at No 6 Malpas Place - my first proper parents. It's there off New Street in Dublin 8."

A well-spoken man, he is clean shaven, well washed, with deeporange nicotine-stained fingers. He says his foster father "was a labourer and she was a dealer in old clothes in the Iveagh Market." No 6 Malpas Place was a tenement house, he says.

"There were three families. The Malones lived upstairs and old Molly Cullen lived in the room next to ours."

It was a happy childhood, he says, and while attending St Kevin's national school, although he had no heady ambitions, he certainly didn't think he'd end up sleeping in a pipe. "Oh, I never thought I'd be a doctor or anything. No one who went to that school thought they were going to be a doctor. Sure I could hardly read until I was 26. No, but I thought I'd leave school and have a good life with a job.

"I left school when I was 14 and got a job in Hercules bicycle factory. I used to put the spokes in the wheels - `lacing the wheels' they called it."

He left after two years and worked as a messenger boy and then as a builder, at which he continued until well into his twenties. Work dried up, however, and he has been drawing dole, with sporadic breaks when he got work in Brennan's bakery, since the late 1960s.

He lived in his foster parents' home until after they died, he in 1972, she in 1982. He paid the rent but after several break-ins and an arson attack in which half the house was destroyed, the landlord emptied the house in 1993.

"So I went to live on the streets." Asked whether it was depressing, he answers: "Well, I'd never lived on the streets before. I just lay down and slept on the pavements, in doorways. It was June so it wasn't too cold, and then I was in and out of hostels. They were all right.

"Oh, of course I went to the corporation, but when you're a bachelor you have to wait until last. The families have to be looked after first."

So, on the streets remained. Sometimes he slept on a bench outside a bank in Ballsbridge, and he first spotted the pipe "walking up and down along here".

Some time last autumn, when it was getting particularly cold, he crawled inside it one night for shelter. He has since blocked off each end of the 8 ft long pipe - with a wall at one end and at the other a half-wall with a door hinged to it. The pipe is about 4 ft high.

"I made the door with an old bit of timber I got out there," he says, pointing to the piles of rubbish, shopping trolleys and pram frames just outside the pipe. "I built the walls with old bricks I found. They are all uneven so it took about two days. I bought the hinges, and the cement but I had no sand. It's quite a good job, isn't it?", he remarks.

He gets "about £75.20 a week" old-age pension. "And of course I have no rent to pay". He used to drink but doesn't any more.

He cooks every day and he shows a large tin can with small holes punched about the walls, in which he lights bits of paper and wood to make a sort of bunsen burner. "I had sausages and bread this morning," he smiles, "and I'll have that again for tea." He washes in water collected in a billy-can outside and he shaves every day.

"It does get cold, of course. See," he says knocking the cement with his knuckles, "if the weather's cold that gets cold. But I just get under a blanket . . . No I don't get bored, no. Sometimes I go into town if I need things. Sometimes I read a paper. And no, I don't get lonely. Sure I have no one belonging to me, but people give me things. People are good like that."

He has never been back to Germany, nor has he wondered about his parents or had any desire to try and find them. "What's the point in going back there? It was a war. Many people were killed and, as well, I don't speak German."

Asked whether he gets depressed, he looks quizzical, then breaks into another smile. "No, no I'm a very happy person," he nods. He's not worried about the future either, despite having no expectation of getting a permanent home.

"Where would I get a house? I know, yes, one day I might be too old to live here, but everyone dies of old age eventually, don't they?"