Homeless children: Sinéad, 12 – ‘If I had my own room I could listen to Justin Beiber’

“Am I happy? No. I live in a bedroom with my mum, two brothers and two sisters. That’s six of us in a bedroom. There are two wardrobes in the room. My clothes are in a bag under the bed and I can’t arrange things the way I’d like.

“I get up at seven o’clock, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth. I throw my books in my bag. It is, like, two boys there, and there’s no privacy. I do the homework on the bed.

“My brothers want to watch Nickolodeon, and I want to watch ‘X Factor’. I’m not allowed friends come and visit, or family. I miss them coming around. It’s important to have friends over, to talk to them.

“If I had my own room I could listen to Justin Bieber. I can’t put up my Justin Bieber posters or listen to my music.

“We don’t go out in the area, because there’s a park but it’s full of junkies, people drinking, so we stay in the room. It’s not healthy, just lying on the bed.

“I worry about my mam. She never wears a jacket and she does be soaked. If she got soaked she’d get sick.

“My ideal would be a house. If we had our own kitchen we wouldn’t all be in the kitchen all at once. It’s so crowded. I think about how long it might take to get a house. In a year I want us to be in a house. It has to have a garden.

“When we go back to the room . . . I don’t feel like we’re going home, because it’s just a room. I don’t want to be there for Christmas.”