“I never thought I was going to be off the street,” said a man from Co Waterford who experienced drug addiction and homelessness for 20 years.
On Monday, Depaul, a cross-Border charity supporting people experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness, published new research that found it is rarely the result of one event.
Homelessness, the report said, is more often is a “domino effect of compounding circumstances that can leave people with nowhere else to turn”.
The research highlighted five common pathways into homelessness – losing a home, relationship breakdown and domestic abuse, family breakdown and bereavement, childhood adversity and care experience, and addiction, mental health and the cyclical journeys through homelessness.
In August, the official number of homeless people in the State was 17,885, including 5,830 children.
Dean, (37) said he became homeless due to addiction. From the age of 12, he started smoking hash and progressed to using “anything and everything”.
He said he came from “good parents” but after “experimenting” as a child a “divide” grew between him and his family and he ran away.
He was addicted to drugs for 20 years and in that time was homeless and spent time in psychiatric units, prison and in and out of hostels.
He said he was “lost” and “broken” adding that he suffered with his mental health due to his addiction.
“I didn’t see any way out of it ... it was very dark for quite a while.”
He said loneliness and addiction led to “all of them situations of homelessness, prison, things I never thought would have happened to me”.
He said things continued to get “worse and worse” as his mental health deteriorated. He attempted suicide multiple times.
He said drugs led him to “total self-hatred” and self-destruction.
“So many people tried to help me, whether it was in the hostels, in the psychiatric units and I just rebelled and rebelled because I just hated what way my life went.
He said he was “so shut off from the services” that he didn’t know anyone who had gotten clean from drugs.
He added that he didn’t think there was any hope or way back from where he was.
Now, he is the “complete opposite of that lost, lonely young man” and has been clean for four-and-a-half years.
At the start of his prison sentence, Dean said he felt like he had “lost everything” and was “really, really angry” with himself.
All he had was a “tracksuit on my back and a pouch of tobacco”, he said.
“I hated myself for it and I used that anger and strength to say to myself that in this prison sentence ‘I’m not going to use any more.’”
He did not use for the entire sentence and completed a six-month residential treatment.
“I tried to rebel in thinking that the services were against me, that was my belief. But it wasn’t that way, like, all these people were trying to help me.”
After engaging with Depaul, Dean has his “first ever forever home” in Dublin where he lives with his partner and two “beautiful” sons, adding that he is “very, very grateful” to the charity.
He hopes to help others in addiction services. “It’s something that I’m very passionate about.”
He said he does not have any mental health issues now and keeps himself “as fit and healthy as possible” by running marathons and “doing all these beautiful things that recovery has given me”.
He urged other people in a similar situation to “share the darkness”.
He advised those people to find someone to open up to and to link in with services. “There is the world of support in Ireland, you need to reach out.”
In the research, carried out by Coyne Research, many of the participants described the difficulties of trying to find a home through the wider housing system, with the private rental market a particular source of frustration.
They also spoke about finding out about important supports by chance, pointing to the need for clearer information and signposting.
Participants identified practical changes that could help such as bringing vacant properties into use, improving access to housing supports and providing greater consistency in the services people rely on.
David Carroll, chief executive of Depaul, said this research is “an opportunity” for the wider public to “understand these issues to a greater extent”.
“There’s such a range of kind of disparate kind of issues that do lead people into the situation.”
He said it is a “huge challenge to get people out of temporary accommodation”.
“They are completely disempowered, mostly from a financial perspective,” he said, adding that they can’t buy a home and “find it really difficult to access private rental accommodation because ... the housing assistant payment ... hasn’t kept pace with private rent, which has gone through the roof”.