‘I didn’t want to end up dead ... I just wanted to be normal’

Times change. Here a young woman, now back living in Ireland, gives her views on aspects of the Irish care system as she experienced it some years ago, and how her overseas placement helped turn her life around.

“I just needed someone to tell me enough was enough, put their foot down and say look, this is it, these are your only options, this is your life, this is the road you could be heading down and you have to change,” she says.

On what life was like before the placement: “I just kept running, every chance I got. Just go into town, get drunk, sleep out. At the time that’s what everybody is doing. I have a friend who is staying with me right now and he was in care and I met him after I came out of care, like, but we were talking about it the other day — you have no family links, if anybody was sent to a residential unit at a young age, how could they learn to love, learn to be part of a family, learn how to raise their own kids? They can’t. They really can’t. You can’t feel part of something, you have staff who change every day, you stay there with someone for a few hours you might not see that staff for another week, it might be the only person that you want to talk to.”