Mr. Niall Murphy:

I fell into drug addiction when I was around 26 years of age. In the 1990s there was a rave scene in Dublin and I got caught up in it. I found that gradually over the years, the addiction turned very ugly. I tried to stop but I could not. The drug addiction progressed into harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. I was living in a house in Crumlin with three others but because of my addiction I was involved in a lot of anti-social behaviour. I was shoplifting from a local supermarket, leaving syringes around the house and so forth. The landlord found out about it and he kicked me out onto the street. That was where my homelessness started.

Obviously, when I became homeless, things got a lot more chaotic. During those years of homelessness I lived in homeless shelters and suffered many near-fatal overdoses. I remember being rushed to hospital in an ambulance at least six times during that period. There was a local centre run by Focus Ireland which helped homeless people and on a couple of occasions I went there. The centre had an information sheet with the names of landlords who would accept rent allowance. I got lucky at one stage and got a small bedsit in Terenure but I only lasted about five weeks there because the root issue was not being dealt with. I was still using drugs and it got to the stage where I could not pay my rent and I ended up homeless again. That happened again about a year later when I got a place in Rathgar. I lasted around the same amount of time there - four to five weeks - and ended up homeless again.

Eventually, I heard about the Tiglin programme in 2008. I went into Tiglin and did the 16-month programme. When I got to the end of the programme, Tiglin provided me with an after-care house where I lived for two years before moving back to living in society. I went to college in UCD for two years, got married and today I have a mortgage. I have all of that because I went through treatment. I could not get out of homelessness until I addressed my addiction problem. I did that in Tiglin and today everything is different. Everything has completely changed.