Sleeping rough: ‘There were drugs, there was violence’

A woman who was homeless and addicted to heroin has spoken about how she ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Dublin, and how a charity has helped her to rebuild her life. Sarah, who does not want to be named, has also spoken about the death of Jonathan Corrie in Dublin’s city centre on this week’s “Róisín Meets” podcast.

“I thought, my god, he’d rather sleep on the street than go anywhere for help. What happened to him that he didn’t trust anything to do with the system? Who hurt him? That’s what I thought. The hopelessness… your will can just go, and you just lie down and die”.

Sarah, now 38, says she was violently abused by her mother, who was herself abused throughout her life. “She was that violent, she tried to stab me, she chased me with knives… violence until you were unconscious. And then she’d come back in and start again”.

She could not report the abuse, she says, for fear of being separated from her seven siblings. “I was afraid of the system coming and taking us away and separating us. I think that’s just… it’s wrong. You can’t separate hurt and damaged children from each other. All I had was them, and all they had was me”.

A friend introduced her to heroin. “’Here, it’ll get rid of the pain’, and she held my hand. I thought, she sees and hears me, she knows my pain, and she understands my suffering. And I just took it”.

She was soon thrown out of her mother’s house and became homeless. “I slept in broken cars, broken-down buildings, anywhere. Would I sleep in hostels or anything like that? I wouldn’t go near them, and I never did. I was terrified of what would happen to me in those places”.

She often slept in Dublin city centre for the security that passers-by provided. “Cos If anyone tried to rape me or do terrible things to me, there’d be normal minded people that would know and it wouldn’t be accepted. Because if I stayed in the area I came from, there was so much sickness, there was so much that was accepted,” she says.

After going through a detox program, Sarah was helped by Daisyhouse, a charity providing accommodation for women who are getting of the street, and the space and security to recover from illness, abuse and addiction

“It’s been an amazing journey. You get tools to emotionally regulate, how to have an awareness of depression and anger within yourself,” she says. “You learn how to self-sooth”.

The charity is behind a photographic exhibition, “Faces of Homelessness” which is running until December 13th in the Powerscourt Town House.

To hear Sarah's story, log on to the Roisin Meets Soundcloud page or subscribe for free via iTunes or Stitcher.