`I used to try to get over my depression by sleeping a lot and as soon as the baby went to sleep I would sleep," says Sandra Convery.

In the early 1990s she was a 19year-old single mother trying to cope with the shock of having a baby, and the responsibilities that went with it. She was finding the coping very difficult.

"I was a young mother living out of the family home," she says. "I was very depressed and lonely."

The children of single mothers are at a higher-than-average risk of being taken into care. And Sandra's experience illustrates the pressures that can lead to this tragedy for mother and child. Often knowing nobody in their flat complexes or housing estates, many single mothers end up, after their baby is born, living in isolation, on a low income, with no social life and no adult to talk to.

But Sandra's luck was about to change. Ten years ago a then social worker, Anna Lynch, set up an Irish branch of Homestart which links volunteers - who are parents themselves - with families where there are children under five and which need support, friendship and practical help. When a public health nurse put Sandra in touch with Homestart, "that's when my life started to get back to normal again". "Lisa, my volunteer, visited me every week. I learned to trust and become friends with her. She brought back my confidence and trust in other people. She supported me when I felt low and when I needed a shoulder to cry on.

"If I was after being up all night with the child or anything, if Lisa came she would say `you put your head down and have a little rest, I will go for a walk with the child'."

Homestart also helped Sandra to break down her isolation by introducing her to other mothers at weekly coffee mornings and by bringing the mothers out once a month. "For me at that time it might be the only night I would get out. They would subsidise the meal. That night might be the only night any of those women would get out."

Today Sandra is a volunteer with Homestart, visiting people in the situation she used to be in.

What would have happened to her without Homestart?

"I think I would have been still very depressed and still in the bed."

A leaked Department of Health and Children report recently suggested it can cost as much as £2,000 a week to keep a child in semi-secure residential care. Meanwhile Homestart, which is run by 25 volunteers, operates on a budget of £40,000 a year in the Republic. Yet, though Homestart has numerous branches in Britain and, she says, is one of the biggest charities in Northern Ireland, the State has been slow to the point of inactivity in providing funds to expand Homestart in the Republic. There is the original branch in Blanchardstown, currently supported by the Eastern Health Board, and recently one was started in Cork city, based in the Blackpool Community Centre, and that's the lot.

She is "sick" of going to conferences and hearing people talking about supporting families when the reality is that "when a crisis arises, incest or drugs or whatever, that's where the money goes". Her anger is echoed by Joan Ashbrook, a Homestart volunteer and chair of the Blanchardstown branch.

"Everybody is saying prevention is what's needed," she says. Yet the health services "have been very slow to provide the money to spread Homestart".

The attention and resources of social services go to families in crisis - but "if we can get to them before the crisis the crisis may never happen".