Rebuilding after addiction: 'I got a glimpse of the other side, and I like it, I don't miss my old life'
Sean O'Reilly, right, a graduate of Tiglin and trainee cafe manager with Aubrey McCarthy, chairman of the organisation at The Rise cafe. "I just broke barriers with myself and made myself go down and work in the cafe," says Sean. Photo: Moya Nolan
Sean O'Reilly, 25, entered rehab for drug addiction at the height of the pandemic - October 2020.
"I had to ring in every day to get my name down in Tiglin (Wicklow), they'd put a tick beside your name each time you rang. I rang every day for five months until I got a place," explains Sean, originally from Dublin.
In the years leading up to this point, there had been a series of lows.
"I kept hitting rock bottom and then getting back up. But I couldn't get the balance. There'd be one good week, one bad week. But having gotten through it all, now I can see I had hit rock bottom that last time," explains Sean.
Sean started using drugs at about 15 years of age, and it gradually progressed until addiction had full control of his life.
The biggest impact of the addiction was on his relationships with his family and his mental health - they were Sean's biggest motivators for entering treatment. "It destroyed everything. It destroyed my mental health, left it for tatters," says Sean.
It was a gentle intervention from a family friend in May 2020 that saw him choose recovery with the sudden and simple act of signing a piece of paper.
"It was a friend of my ma's who reached out. I was none the wiser. She just said: 'Will you talk to this fella?'
"I just agreed to it straight away, I knew I needed help but I was too proud to admit it.
"When I met him he had these forms in his hands and he said it was for this place called Tiglin. He just said 'It'll give you a couple of months to get your head together'. I signed them there and then," says Sean.
When he eventually started treatment in October 2020, on a 10-month placement, he was assigned a key worker and had daily tasks like kitchen duty or cleaning work. He credits his key worker, Peter Sheridan, as the mainstay of his recovery.
Sean and Peter would have one-to-one sessions together, which included getting out for walks. Another key part of his recovery was the "structure, routine and discipline" which the centre gave him with 7am starts, 8am breakfast, study classes and group sessions at the weekend.
By July 2021, he left Tiglin and moved to the charity's transitional housing, Carraig Eden in Greystones, Co. Wicklow. It was here that he'd start work at The Rise at the Cove cafe on the house's site by the sea, a job that would help him recover a sense of respect for himself.
"When people go past the big blue house (Carraig Eden), you might hear them saying: 'That's the house where people are struggling'. So when the job in the cafe came up I said: 'I can't work there, people will see me and say sure he's only a drug addict'.
"I had recovered mentally and physically, but I still hadn't recovered my communication and confidence. But I just broke barriers with myself and made myself go down and work in the cafe," says Sean.
He says he never foresaw this future for himself. "I never thought I'd get my brother and sister back and now they're ringing me every day," says Sean.
As well as being back in touch with his family he is working five days a week full time and goes to college two days a week where he is studying critical and ethical thinking. On college days he opens the cafe at 6.30am in the morning.
He says he works on himself every single day and encourages anyone who is struggling to speak out. "If you don't talk about things they fester and if you speak about it it takes the power away," says Sean.
And does he miss his old life? "My life today was unforeseeable 18 months ago. I've gotten a glimpse of the other side, and I like it, I don't miss my old life".
Ger McBrearty, 50, gets up every morning at about 6.30am. He readies himself for the day ahead before waking his eight-year-old son. After breakfast, Ger drops his boy to school and then heads to his job as a mechanic in Frontline Bikes in Dublin's Inchicore.
This life, as a tax-paying single dad is unimaginable compared to his previous one, where "chronic" heroin addiction and "lengthy" prison sentences were his norm for years on end. "I was a chronic user and that's putting it lightly," explains Ger.
Ger's pathway to addiction was preceded by "trauma." At birth, he was taken immediately from his mother. He was 18 months old before he was adopted from a mother and baby home by a family in Donegal.
"I was running away from the age of 11. I got myself into trouble trying to support myself," explains Ger. He ended up homeless on the streets of Dublin at 15-and-a-half years of age.
"After about a year of that, I was really struggling. Dublin was a horrible place in the 1980s, it was a deprived city, so I went to London. But you have to know I despised drugs, like I was anti-drugs. I started working on the building sites and I was earning an absolute fortune over there," says Ger.
But when the building trade slowed down in London in the 1990s, Ger found himself homeless once again and it was at this point he was introduced to the drug that would dominate the next 20 years of his life.
"The heroin scene had just started there and low and behold it took all my pain and anger away, all the turmoil in my life. I was about 22," says Ger.
He returned home to Ireland just as the dial was about to turn on a millenium having gotten off drugs. However, a life-altering incident that he didn't see coming, nor had the knowledge or support to deal with, set him back.
"I escaped back to what was the norm for me, back to heroin, it was 2000. It would be 2018 before I stopped completely," says Ger.
He is approximately five years clean now and his son's birth in 2013 was the turning point that saw him reach out for help. In 2014, he walked into Frontline Make Change in Inchicore, a community-based addiction service.
"So I just walked in off the street one day into Kavanagh House. I started working with a key worker, attending one-to-one sessions and group sessions," he explains.
It was this wrap-around support and finally gaining an understanding of the trauma he had experienced that saw him quit drugs for good.
"It was having the support, having a place to go to talk about the issues that previously affected me, having guidance, having people who understood the effects of long-term trauma.
"It wasn't until I did training on trauma that I understood my own - from the moment I was taken from my mother's womb and handed over. I didn't know the effects of this - all these things came into play. I ended up going to Maynooth and studying addiction.
"I'm a trained drug practitioner, and even when I say that to myself I'm like: 'Jesus, someone invested in me, saw something in me'," says Ger.
For someone currently in addiction his advice is simple - talk.
"Walk into your local drug service, make that contact, just having the willingness to change because there is someone there who is understanding. The more open and honest you are the easier it is to fix the things that are wrong.
"I'm a normal functioning member of society, I am contributing to society in every way I can and I'm a single dad. I'm a beacon of light for people in addiction. I just want people to read this and say: 'If he can turn his life around, then I definitely can".
In 2021, Damien Quinn started his "dream job". Having just graduated from University College Cork with a master's in cooperatives and social enterprise, his life is now "worlds apart" from the one he had been living just over a decade ago.
"If I told myself 10 years ago where I'd be today in my family life and in my professional life, I wouldn't have believed it," says Damien, 38, originally from Galway. What's the dream job?
"The social enterprise regeneration project coordinator with Galway Rural Development," says Damien.
In 2009, Damien left prison with big plans. He believes prison was the easy part. He soon found out that living with the consequences of his convictions after prison was the really hard part, because of the secondary punishment that comes with having the ex-offender label.
"Before prison, I ended up homeless, I lost everything, my family, and prison was the escape from the madness I was living. I had all these hopes and aspirations getting out the gate.
"I had done really well in prison and I had done open university courses, I had big plans to give back to my friends and family," explains Damien.
However, on exit from prison, he was given a "bus pass and the price of a B&B for the night". Not only this, but his major stepping stone, a rehab centre, had just had its funding withdrawn.
He got housing and was paying rent, but with no employer willing to give him work, he was relying entirely on social welfare.
"The biggest mistake for me was relocating away from where I had grown up because I was accountable to no one.
"I ended up going back into addiction and criminality and I had a drug-induced psychosis. It took several months to recover from that," explains Damien.
"I got home, I took ownership of my behaviour and of my responsibility to my loved ones. I realised I was my problem," he adds.
With so many employment rejections he decided to pursue education first.
"I came across a course in business and community development with Equal Ireland, I didn't know how I'd pay for it, but I fell in love with the community development side of the course straight away. And then halfway through the course I got a job in distribution," says Damien.
It was this job that would support him for the next several years with him progressing to manager of a national distribution network. The job allowed him to pay for his honours degree which he did during the day.
But the time came when he wanted to "go looking for work in the day" as he and his partner wanted to start a family. Now with a degree and years of employment at managerial level on his CV, the answer from employers was still "no" one hundred times over, once they had seen his old convictions.
"The only job that came up was in an auctioneers, a front-of-house role," says Damien. It would be two weeks before his old life would interfere with his new one.
"The owner pulled me up and said: 'What's all this about?' He had googled me. I told him: 'That's only part of the story, let me tell you everything'.
"I said: 'You're referring to my life that was a decade ago, I've put myself through education since then and I've come from a company where I was a manager, if it's a problem I will go back'," says Damien.
His new boss simply replied with: "We all have things in our past that we would like to forget". Damien would work there for four years, before moving on to his current role.
"Employment played a crucial role in moving away from criminality," says Damien.
Today, he is also halfway through starting his own social enterprise, Spéire Nua, based on his thesis from his master's in UCC. He won seed funding from Social Entrepreneurs Ireland for it. The aim is to help people with convictions certify commitment to change and give a current and balanced view of the person today rather than only the person they used to be.
His big why?
"I heard all the big beautiful plans in prison about starting new lives, making amends and the plans for their families. Those stories came from people who are now dead and who are back where they were because the opportunities weren't there and no one was willing to see past the convictions they cannot change," says Damien.
"We accept we have done wrong and we want to move on in a constructive way. Society needs to capture that desire to give back otherwise people end up back where they came from and nobody wins in that situation," he adds.
Follow Damien on Twitter @SpeireN
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