Dublin Marathon: Former drug addict to run ‘the streets where friends died over the years’

Paul Killeen (61), who has overcome four decades of heroin and later crack cocaine addiction, is “determined” to finish the Dublin Marathon on Sunday.

“It will be emotional to run the streets where I used, where friends died over the years. That will carry me through on the day, thinking of people I grew up with who are gone because of the drugs.”

From the Liberties, Dublin, he has been drug-free for five years, having first used heroin when he was 14. He endured brutality and sexual abuse at school.

“I went to the Christian Brothers, and I was dyslexic; I didn’t know that at the time. I was called ‘thick’ and ‘stupid’ and came home with black eyes. If you were late for school, you got the leather strap.”

“I was an altar boy, and things happened there.” He went on to Bull Alley vocational school – now Liberties College, but got expelled after three months “for fighting”.

He left school unable to read or write but got an apprenticeship in a garment factory in Smithfield. It was around this point that he was introduced to heroin.

Asked if this was a difficult time in his life, he says: “To be honest, I was 100 per cent happier than when I was in school. I had an apprenticeship, and I was accepted. I wasn’t judged.”

He didn’t realise how his drug habit was becoming an addiction, however. He lost his job as a jeans cutter and was soon “in and out of prison” for robberies to pay for heroin. He learnt to read and write at St Patrick’s Institution, where young offenders were kept, and found acceptance there.

Still, heroin came before everything: “I was living with my ma, then sofa surfing and eventually ended up on the streets.”

In the 1990s, he met a woman and had two children with her. “I was an addict when they were born. They never saw me clean until five years ago. I would trample over people to get what I thought I needed.”

After he stole his daughter’s Confirmation money, he decided to go to England, “thinking I would get off heroin”.

He lived on the streets of Birmingham, spent time in prison and was introduced to crack cocaine.

His mother, with the help of social workers, tracked him down and brought him back to Dublin. “Crack was only starting in Dublin then. I was injecting. I hadn’t patience to smoke it.”

About 2019 he frequented the Lighthouse cafe on Pearse Street, a drop-in centre for homeless people, run by the Tiglin addiction charity. Its founder, Senator Aubrey McCarthy, and its staff encouraged Paul to think about recovery.

A confluence of circumstances in 2021 led him to apply for a place on Tiglin’s 16-month residential rehabilitation programme.

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“At an appointment in St James’s Hospital, my doctor, [Prof Colm] Bergin, said, ‘Paul, if you don’t stop the drugs, your immune system is nearly gone. You are gone in six weeks’.

“Something clicked in my head. I’d just had enough. I was tired.”

He was offered a place on the Tiglin’s men’s residential rehabilitation programme in Ashford, Co Wicklow, starting December 2021, followed by aftercare in the charity’s Greystones centre.

A key worker, who ran daily, encouraged him to run with her. He had run for Dublin as a child and had loved it.

After 40 years taking drugs “to block every feeling I ever had out”, he was in recovery, without drugs, and reliving a lot of trauma.

“Running helped me process that. My running is my [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings. I can’t do meetings. I can’t sit in a room. It makes me very anxious. But I love going out on a run. I feel free when I am out.”

He has been training for the marathon for more than a year and he is “excited but nervous”.

The day after the marathon, he travels to South Africa to volunteer for Tiglin in the townships of Cape Town. It will be his fifth trip there. “It’s a way I can give back.”

He has no regrets about life. “It is what it is. I am happy. I am working for Tiglin. I have my children back in my life. My ma is 88, and she’s delighted. My sister, I never got on with her. We are like that now,” he says, crossing his fingers.

“And I will finish the marathon on Sunday if I have to crawl the last miles. I am determined.”