SPECIAL REPORT, DAY 1: ‘I was scared of my son’ reveals mother of heroin user

‘Margaret’ would only go out under cover of darkness when her son was living at home.

“Shame and self-blame, that’s all I felt. I used to go around in the dark ashamed. I wouldn’t even go to the shop. I’d found out some of my neighbours were talking, judging me as a parent,” she says.

Her neighbours didn’t need to cross her threshold to know her life had been torn asunder since her 23-year-old son, ‘Seán’ moved home.