Citizen army fights to save the children

"ADDICTS, we care! Pushers, beware!"

The chant rose from the phalanx of people rolling along the dark streets behind O'Connell Street. It echoed off the canyon walls of the blocks of corporation flats.

"What do we want? Pushers out! ... Pushers, pushers, pushers! Out! Out! Out!"

- it was like theatre. The litany of shouted question and shouted response would die away when the leaders of the march called a halt.

The last stragglers - grannies linking each other along, kids on roller skates - would catch up at the back of the murmuring crowd. From somewhere an arc light would spring into life on a wall.

It probed this balcony, that balcony. Its light briefly illuminated - the open mouthed neighbours standing on their balconies in the dark. Then it settled, trained on the windows of one flat.

"Pushers out! Pushers out!" the crowd roared up at the windows. Someone drummed a deep rhythm on the roof of a shed. Bangers whizzed, crackling, across the black sky.

"There's someone on the roof" a man called.

"Keep moving. Move on," the organisers urged through their bull horns, hustling the crowd out of the courtyard surrounded by flats.

A few gardai stood off to the sides, quietly using their walkie talkies.

"Hiya, Karen," a man with an Alsatian dog called to a woman. "Hiya, Christy!"

The marchers settled back to gossip and banter as they fell in again, and moved purposefully forward.

At half past nine they've already done one house and one flat. There are several more pushers to intimidate before the march disperses. The people are matter of fact. This is work.

They surged along, a thousand people at least, past the "pushers out!" banners in Sean MacDermott Street, down Parnell Street, past the ILAC centre and up to the flats at Dominick Street. The chattering and chanting died to silence again.

The arc light wavered across the front of the flats and stopped at one of them. Men heavies ran up the stairs and came out on the balcony and surrounded the door of the flat.

With them was a well dressed woman from the local anti drugs committee. She would have been the one to bang on the door - to show the pushers side and the anti pushers outside to each other.

She's very brave to do it someone murmured. And suddenly it was obvious why the marchers had to be there.

Pushers are no angels. You need a thousand people waiting below when you bang on the door to announce to someone already feared and hated that they are henceforth stripped of their income, homeless, broken from their networks, found guilty, without trial or appeal, by their neighbours. The crowd roared deep throated approval.

THE marchers were a risen people. These were the very streets of 1916 but people didn't come out like this for the Rising.

They didn't come out against poverty, against the IRA, against rape, against emigration, against TB. But for this - against the drug dealers who are ruining their children - they have come out.

Earlier that night a march in Crumlin had at least 3,000 people on it. The night before - during the match against Macedonia - more people than the place could hold tried to get into an anti drugs meeting in the GAA club in Cabra.

On Monday, the Father Mathew Hall in Church Street was packed. Jim Mitchell was at that. On Tuesday, the ITGWU hall in Clogher Road in Cabra was crammed with hundreds and hundreds of people.

Someone from the Garda aggrieved locals said, announced that this was an unlawful gathering and that the hall would have its licence taken away if it allowed a meeting again - "even though Ben Briscoe was there."

On the march to Dominick Street people from the south inner city and the north inner city - they don't know their way around each other parts of the city and a girl from Rialto thought the Rotunda was the government swapped experiences.

I heard a woman saying to other women, dyed blond heads bent toward each other as they trudged along in their heels: "The guards came into Dolphin's Barn flats because we gave them the information that there was heroin stored in the cellars, two of the cellars.

Like, we told them what two.

The cellars are where they keep the meters for the light and the heat and all that. And didn't they come in and break down every door of all the cellars?

"Now they're all standing open. And there were keys for them. They could have just asked. Like - if that's what they call community relations . . ."

RELATIONS seem better between the police and the people on the north side of the city. The march to Dominick Street had taken off from a packed and vibrant meeting in the Macushla Ballroom, down on Amiens Street, near the station.

A Fitzgibbon Street garda in uniform was not allowed in. But a sergeant from Store Street, in casual dress, was asked to contribute. He was cheered when he announced that two dealers that day, in the courts, had got seven and six years respectively.

He was obviously well known and liked and he spoke with care. He called addicts "people who are suffering from drug abuse". The addicts, after all, are the beloved sons and daughters of the communities on the march.

Anyway, the garda didn't seem to be that important to the meeting. For one, the situation is far beyond the control of any one agency, however powerful or trusted.

Local groups, for instance, are springing up everywhere and affiliating to the city wide anti pusher campaign.

Sheriff Street has just got off the ground and a woman told the Macushla meeting that on Monday night: "We started on our list of 40 pushers. That's in our small area alone. We served notice on 26 of them. They're answerable for that.

On the south side, where Josie Dwyer was murdered, local people are demanding 750 treatment places for local addicts. In a street near the North Strand there will be a seven day centre for 30 people.

"No methadone carry outs" man at the meeting assured its neighbours.

Six residents are training as counsellors. In the Our Lady of Lourdes church, a rehabilitation programme will start soon for some of the 14 year old heroin addicts.

A man passed a small park near the Coombe that morning. Four girls in school uniform were behind the bushes, shooting up. There are 20 to 30 flats being used for dealing in Dolphin's Barn.

All the numbers are small. But they're in every single place. The scale of the effort needed to tight the situation would be completely daunting it people were not fuelled by desperation. The Eastern Health Board was the only State agency of interest to the meeting.

Treatment was their central concern. Moving the local pusher catches attention and attracts the comments of outsiders. But the addiction is the problem. The Garda can do nothing about the addiction.

The new addicts are very young. They're children. "In the 1980s, the first addicts were scumbags anyway," a veteran of Concerned Parents Against Drugs says. "They'd have been robbing handbags and doing cars anyway."

"But now the kids don't even get through puberty. And they're not like the flower power people. They don't want to be laid back, they want the buzz. Buzz, buzz. And after a while - look at them - like ghosts."

A boy whose skin was greenish grey leaned against the wall of the Macushla, visibly dying of AIDS. A woman read a poem about her son in Mountjoy, dying of AIDS. There was a cardboard coffin propped against the stage of the Macushla, with syringes painted on it, and a skull and crossbones, and the words, "Deliver Us From Evil."

"This generation is f... d," a man shouted into the microphone and then there was a pause. "I'm sorry I said that," he muttered.

MEANWHILE, the platform speakers spoke of hope. A training course in how to chair meetings and deal with the media. Training for people in counselling addicts. A restructured and more helpful health board.

There'll be a healing Mass at the Salesians. There'll be an antidrugs pageant for the kids at Hallowe'en. Send the dealers who say your kids owe them money to us.

Tony Gregory speaks. Joe Costello, the only man in the hall in a suit. Christy Burke. The three who have borne the heat of the day. The people on their plastic chairs lean forward to listen, their coats on for the autumn night, sticking it out even though they can't smoke.

Teenagers look down seriously from the balcony. The whole community is here, and there are hundreds more people outside. There is no politics, no Sinn Fein. The very idea is absurd. The focus of this movement is perfectly clear.

The people pour out on to the streets and line up to march a mile because a man has come down from Dominick Street to appeal for help. The focus is on the pushers.

US television filmed the proceedings. No other drug ravaged people have tried to do what these Dublin people are trying. To go out themselves and defeat the barons; to treat the addicts themselves; to clean up the city themselves; to accept help from the relevant authorities without being led by them.

This week, they surged through the streets with the freshness of newly raised troops. But if they can't make a difference, giving it all they have patrols, meetings, marches, every day, every night the defeat will be terrible.

"The next gene, ration will not be heroin addicts, the community activist Mick Rafferty had roared from the stage of the Macushla, pointing dramatically at a row of sweetfaced schoolchildren. The audience rose and punched the air. "Oh, please God," a woman whispered. "Please God."