Four of Patrick Whelan's five children are due to go back to school next week. As with the other 783,000 young people in the State returning to their books they know which schools they'll be attending.
However, they cannot say with conviction that they know where they will go home to each evening. Since 1997 the Whelan family has been effectively homeless.
Patrick and his partner, Marian, lost their house in Finglas, Dublin, in 1994. Following a spell abroad the family has been housed in a variety of accommodations, from B & Bs to hostels, to the couch in friends' or families' homes.
"I had to go to England for personal reasons," explains Patrick. "While everything was being sorted out over there we were living in a local authority house in Birmingham. But when it came to coming back to Dublin, we had lost the house in Finglas. We had to give it up because we had been renting it from the council."
Patrick brought his family - Marian, Peter (17), Carol (15), Samantha (13), Robert (6) and the youngest, Anne (6) - back to Dublin, to homelessness. Though never without a roof over their heads come the evening, they have stayed in a B & B on the North Circular Road (for two months) and another B & B off Parnell Street for 1 1/2 years. "That was the best we ever got", says Patrick. "We had two rooms."
They did briefly have a flat in the Buckingham Street area of the north inner city, but when the landlord decided to sell they had to move.
While we talk, at Focus Ireland in Dublin, the youngest three children play with toys in the office.
"It's not fair on these lot," he says. "They are meant to be going back to school next week and we won't be able to get the uniforms. That's if they do go back, and at the minute I think they'll probably miss the first few weeks while we try and sort things out. It's no good not knowing where you're going to be doing your homework each night."
He and Marian are also concerned that as soon as the children begin to settle and make a few friends, they are pulled away.
"Samantha is always saying she misses this friend and that friend," says Marian. "She has been to hell and back and needs some stability."
Currently just Marian and the children are being accommodated - at a B & B in Inchicore - while Patrick has to stay with his brother in Ballymun. He says Marian cannot cope by herself, with the youngest two in particular. She nods in agreement.
"They are always acting up," he says. "If I'm not there they run wild and go mad. We need to be together as a family."
Though he has not worked consistently since being made redundant at a small bakery when it was bought by Brennan's about 10 years ago, he says he would "love to get a bit of work, but I haven't an address to give anyone who might employ me."
On his children he says he'd "love for them to go to school and get a good education, to get everything I never had.
"Of all the things that hurt the most it's walking away from them at night and going back to my brother's. Marian has stood by me all the time, but this situation is pulling the family apart."
Asked where the family will be sleeping that night, Patrick says he will be at his brother's. Marian concedes that she does not know.
"I have to call the housing office in Charles Street at about 4 o'clock to find out," she says.