Linda Reed: The life of Linda Reed, who has died at the age of 45, was a journey from a comfortable middle-class background in south Dublin into hell, then back again to a form of redemption which inspired thousands of others, but which was endured through a pitiless and increasingly debilitating illness with Aids, which eventually killed her.
Diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1988 while she was in prison in Germany for a drug-dealing career brought on through chronic heroin addiction, Ms Reed was told she would be dead in three years. Deported to Ireland, she discovered that Aids was a disease associated in the public mind almost exclusively with gay men and intravenous drug users.
Ms Reed, who had contracted the disease through extra-marital heterosexual intercourse in Germany, determined to become, if necessary, the public face of HIV-positive women in this country.
It proved all too necessary. Two people who worked closely with her at the Dublin Aids Alliance (DAA), Erin Nugent and Ann Nolan, both - but separately - stressed that the most important aspect of Ms Reed's achievement as an Aids worker, which she became in Dublin in the 1990s, was her openness about her condition.
Ms Nugent says that "for so long in the 1990s she was the only woman nationally who was prepared to go public about her HIV-positive status".
Ms Nolan, who also worked in the Open Heart House project in Dublin with Ms Reed, stresses the significance of this in assessing what her death means. "What she did for HIV-positive patients was huge, unique. Her death is a huge blow to the fight against Aids in Ireland, as the level of stigma around HIV is becoming one of the drivers of the epidemic globally. People like Linda help to remove a fear which is irrational."
Her honesty cost her dear. When it became known that she was HIV-positive, she was barred from her local pub in Donnybrook, Dublin, by a barman whom she had regarded as a friend. On at least two further occasions, one on her 40th birthday, she was verbally abused in other bars.
Ms Nugent says Ms Reed helped the work of the DAA in two distinctly practical ways, firstly by providing workshops in schools, prisons and hospitals and by offering advice on policy, and, secondly, by her work individually with HIV-positive women who came to the DAA full of apprehension.
Ms Reed's involvement with the DAA and other organisations supporting those who were HIV-positive did not begin immediately upon her return to Dublin in 1989. Firstly, there was an agonising year of detoxification, in a tiny bedsit flat in Donnybrook, facilitated by her mother, a nurse by profession. Prior to that, she had been estranged for six years from her parents and siblings.
Following this, Ms Reed went on a low-dose methadone programme to keep her addiction at bay and remained on this for the rest of her life. Thereafter, she always contended that addicts should not be put on high-dose methadone until a detox programme had been completed.
Once stabilised, Ms Reed joined the DAA, where she counselled HIV-positive women. In St James's Hospital, Dublin, her role teaching young nurses the sensitivities involved in dealing with those who were HIV-positive was particularly valued. Her work with teenagers was noted for her ability to "level" with the young people and hold their attention.
In 1994, she became a member of the Government's National Aids Strategy Committee, on which she remained for the remainder of her life. Ms Reed became, in due course, the Irish representative on the International Committee of Women living with HIV/Aids. She travelled extensively to Aids conferences in many countries outside Europe, including India and South Africa.
In 2004, she took the place of a very ill African woman in making the closing address to the UN World Conference on Aids in Durban.
A major concern of Ms Reed in all of this work was that, for her, there were no "innocent" victims of HIV/Aids, because there were no "guilty" ones. A former colleague of hers, Trinity College Dublin lecturer in social work Maeve Foreman, says Ms Reed believed "intensely that HIV/Aids was a medical, not a moral, problem".
In 2001, Ms Reed was nominated for a Spirit of the Year Award, and in 2003 RTÉ television made a documentary on her life for the Would You Believe series.
Linda Reed was born in 1962 to James (Jim) Murphy, an accountant, and his wife Maureen (Mo), a nurse, and grew up in Blackrock, Co Dublin, where she attended Sion Hill convent school. There, in her teens, her bright academic promise, which had been noticed early, was blighted when she became addicted to heroin. In her early 20s, married with one child, she left for Germany to try to find a new life.
Although she and her husband subsequently had another child, they eventually separated, the children staying with their father.
Subsequently, she was to enjoy happy years with her son and daughter from 1999, when she was allocated a house in Ballybrack, Co Dublin, by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
Her husband, Dom Reed, and her children, Darry (23) and Merlin (21), survive her.
Linda Reed: born May 4th, 1962; died March 19th, 2007.