Crumbling walls, damp bedrooms: poverty in Celtic Tiger Ireland

A €15 million initiative funded by Irish-American philanthropist Chuck Feeney aims to help one of Ireland's most deprived areas by integrating public and private efforts to improve people's lives. It is being launched today. Kitty Holland reports

Sally Doran's youngest child, Jessica, is coughing - a rasping, ill cough - in the small bedroom at the back of her home, in Brookfield, west Tallaght. The plasterwork on the walls is crumbling and at the foot of the bed are exposed wires where there should be a plug socket.

The two-year-old is lying listlessly on her side, wrapped in thin blankets, on the large single bed she shares with her mother, beneath a window that won't close properly. "I am very worried about her," says Sally. "Usually she'd be full of chat."

On an unseasonably warm October morning the room is "not too cold", says Sally. "But every time winter comes to this house my footprint is in Tallaght hospital with one of the kids."

Showing a referral note from her GP, she says she is bringing Jessica to hospital that afternoon. Her daughter, says the note, has a raised temperature of 39.3 degrees, is vomiting, has inflamed tonsils and has had two courses of antibiotics without response.

The separated mother of nine children - who are aged between two and 18 - shows where they sleep. In the first bedroom upstairs, pillows are lined up at either end of a double and a single bed. In here Oliver (7), Casper (10), Michael (11), Wayne (12) and Tommy (13) sleep. From the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling hangs an exposed wire. There is one wardrobe, bare floorboards, and the window does not open.

In the adjoining, equally spartan room is a double bed where Mary (15) and Ellen (17) sleep, and next to that a smaller room with a single bed where John (18) sleeps. There is little storage space and clothes are folded in piles on the floor.

The painted walls have neither pictures nor mirrors, and are chipped; floors are bare and the plastic casing on a number of plug sockets is broken, rendering them both useless and dangerous.

In the bathroom, the wood-effect lino is peeling from the floor, the small radiator rusting badly, the wash hand-basin is loose against the wall and about 40 tiles are missing from the walls, with more looking ready to fall. Catches are broken on the window, which will not close properly.

"The children are trembling with cold when I take them out of that bath," says Sally. The central heating has not worked for three weeks, despite requests to her landlord, South Dublin County Council, to have it repaired.

"I don't want people to get the impression I'm begging. I'm not looking for donations. I'm just looking for a safe, warm home for my children. It's all any mother would want," she says.

The family's situation is particularly shocking. Even those authors of a report last year on west Tallaght's children, How are our kids?, which described the area as "one of the most marginalised and disadvantaged geographical areas in the country", say Sally's family is more acutely disadvantaged than most in the area. She and her children are "one of the forgotten families", according to Dr Jonathan Healy, policy and research analyst with the Combat Poverty Agency.

Her children are among the 140,000 in Ireland who wake every morning to consistent poverty.

West Tallaght, on the edge of Dublin's sprawl westwards, has more than its fair share of children living in poverty. It is one of the 25 areas identified in the Government's Rapid (Revitalising Areas by Planning, Investment and Development) programme as having the most concentrated levels of consistent poverty.

West Tallaght is also the youngest area. There are more children under the age of 14 in the four estates - Brookfield, Fettercairn, Killinarden and Jobstown - that comprise west Tallaght than in any other part of the country. One in three of its 22,000 people is under 15 and more than half (54 per cent) are under 25.

Unemployment here is twice the national average. While the rate has fallen from 33 per cent in 1996, 10.6 per cent remain out of work.

One-third of all households in west Tallaght are headed by a lone parent - 2½ times the national average. One-quarter of all households (24 per cent) are headed by a lone parent with at least one child under 15 - four times the national average.

As the west Tallaght Child Development Initiative points out, "given that lone parent-headed households are among those at greatest risk of poverty... it follows that the vulnerability of children in lone-parent households is also high".

Educational attainment is low. Of those adults who complete their education, more than 60 per cent have "no more than lower secondary education", according to records, while the proportion of people who cease their formal education at age 15 or younger is about 7 per cent above the national average. The level of third-level education, while rising, remains, at 10.7 per cent, less than half the national level of 26 per cent.

In terms of housing, more than 57 per cent of all households in west Tallaght are in local authority dwellings - nearly six times the national average of 10 per cent. More specifically, 43 per cent of all west Tallaght households are renting their local authority home, which is six times the national average of 6.9 per cent.

Some 14.3 per cent of householders in the area are in the process of buying their homes from South Dublin County Council, compared to 3.5 per cent of households in the State buying from their respective local authority. By all indications the people of west Tallaght face obstacles, social exclusion and levels of poverty that many may find difficult to believe still exist after almost a decade of sustained economic growth nationally. Yet this is the reality in which the children of west Tallaght are growing up.

The How are our kids? study, published by the CDI last October and the main precursor of a major strategy on child poverty in west Tallaght being published today, concluded that the majority of children in the area were carrying a "disproportionate burden of the inequality and poverty characterising Irish society as a whole".

It found that more than one in four of the children lived in houses without adequate heating, resulting in children feeling cold and damp every day.

These living conditions, in addition to the physical environment outside the home - graffiti, rubbish, bullying and the prevalence of stolen cars being driven at speed through the night - were factors contributing to disproportionately high levels of health and psychological problems among the area's children. These included eating disorders, anxiety and depression, bed-wetting and difficulty performing basic activities.

South Dublin County Council says things have improved in the past five years.

John Quinlivan, director of housing, points to the completion of numerous new facilities - enterprise and community centres in Killinarden and Brookfield, a new playground in Jobstown, and a horse project in Fettercairn.

The all-weather pitch has been upgraded in Killinarden while the tendering process to build a full-size swimming pool and leisure facility in west Tallaght and a community centre in Brookfield are nearing completion, he says.

Certainly a visit to the area finds the physical environment somewhat better than in the past. Where there had been just one small, run-down shop serving all of Jobstown, there is now a good-sized Londis outlet, a chemist, a butcher's and a Chinese takeaway.

Also in Jobstown, many of the houses have a small plot of bedding plants and young trees in front, provided in the past year to residents.

"The council came round with vans of plants and little trees about a year ago and offered them to anyone who was interested," explains June Kay of the CDI, who is showing me around the area.

"It makes a huge difference to how people feel when they walk through the estate. People take a bit of pride in their patch and take ownership of them."

She also points to young sapling trees lining many of the roads. "Young kids were pulling them up and wrecking them. But the council just persisted and replaced them each time, and now the kids seem to have given up. Please God they'll be left to grow and mature now. In five years' time they will be lovely."

Quinlivan also says a major refurbishment programme of all the council's dwellings is under way. "We have the second-highest number of dwellings of all local authorities in the country, second only to Dublin City Council. We have 7,800 houses in the county."

About 4,000 of these are in west Tallaght. Among ongoing works are the installation or upgrading of central heating, window replacement and wall/roof installation.

Asked about the Doran family, Quinlivan would not comment on an individual case except to say the Brookfield estates were among the oldest and in worst condition of the county's housing stock.

He stressed all houses were being upgraded, with priority being given to the most pressing cases.

In the How are our kids? study nearly one in three parents found the environment "unsatisfactory" for bringing up children. Almost half felt "overburdened" by life.

This all contributed to higher than average levels of depression among parents in the area, with the predictable impact on the quality of their relationships with their children.

All this is despite the area's designated inclusion in the Government's Rapid programme and the expenditure of an estimated €27 million on children's services.