Homeless mother rears children among drug-users

CCTV cameras have recently been installed in the dining room of the bed and breakfast accommodation where Ms Ann Connors (25) has lived for the past nine months with her two small children.

"The manager put them in two weeks ago to catch people 'goofing off' [high on heroin] so they can take them out and sit them on a bench until they've stopped. There's a good few taking drugs in the place."

Ann's children, Thomas (3) and Ann (2), have lived in B&B accommodation all their lives. Currently in a B&B on Dublin's northside, the three share a small bedroom with a single bed, a double bed and a wardrobe. They share two toilets and one bathroom with five other families.

"It's no good sharing bathrooms like that. It's dangerous like. The other morning I followed Thomas into the bathroom and he had the lid off the sanitary towel container, and there were two 'spikes' [syringe needles] in it."

Sitting in a drop-in centre run by the housing charity Focus Ireland in the Liberties area, Ann says it worries her that her children are living in such circumstances. "But there's not a lot you can do. It's either that or be homeless."

From Dublin, she spent some of her own childhood homeless, sleeping with her mother and siblings at one stage in a squat in Manor Street.

Her children's father is in England and she has been unable to get private accommodation because she cannot read or write. "I'd be too embarrassed to get someone to read the ads for flats in the paper."

Describing a typical day, she says she and the children leave the B&B at about 10 each morning and walk to the Focus Ireland drop-in.

"The kids go to the creche and I do crafts and make different things, watch videos - keep myself busy, you know. At one o'clock we have to go and we walk about, walk the feet off ourselves all day, meet my mother."

They could go back to the B&B, but "it would do your head in, sitting there all day", says Ann.

They have just been accepted for a place in Stanhope Green, a transitional housing project run by Focus Ireland. Ann hopes this means she will be able learn to read and just get some space so Thomas and Ann can be settled.