Ms Anna Rice:

I came into Kinship Care because my daughter has substance misuse issues. They were a lot worse than I had realised. One Saturday, we were dropping our grandson back. He had come to us every weekend since he was born for a sleepover. My daughter just said that she could not do it any more and asked us to take him for a couple of months so that she could go to rehab. Those couple of months did not happen. She did not go to rehab and my grandson is still with us nine and a half years later. My daughter is in recovery but that does not mean she is better. It just means she is not using substances. She has a lot of mental health issues and additional needs so my grandson stays with us. He will never go back to his mam. With recovery, there is always the fear of relapse. My daughter's substances of choice were heroin and crack cocaine. She ended up on the streets here in Dublin. There were services available to her but, unfortunately, there were also services that were not available to her, especially housing, because she is from Meath and not Dublin. She could not access hostels or anything like that.

My grandson had witnessed some traumatic things, although thankfully not too many. As a result of that trauma, he had anger issues, trust issues and all of that. We had to put him into counselling, which we had to pay for ourselves. Unfortunately, I cannot work due to a disability. My husband's wages paid for the counselling because we were not getting a guardian's payment. We were getting no payment. My daughter was still accessing child benefit so we were not getting anything.

When my grandson came to us, he was sleeping in a bed with me because we did not have a bed for him. My husband had to sleep in the junk room in a single bed with all our worldly belongings in the room. That was in 2016. There was no Kinship Care Ireland. There was nothing. I did not know where to go. I was afraid to ring Tusla because I worried I would not be thought suitable to look after my grandson. Where would he go then? Would he go into care? I was afraid of that. We did not know anything. There was nowhere to go. The only advice I got was from a kinship care group in England, Kinship, which gave me some kind of an idea. I did not know what kinship care was. I had never heard the term. I was just looking after my grandson. I realised there was more than just me doing it so I reached out.

I applied for a guardian's payment and, a year and a half after my grandson came to us, we got that. We were then able to do up the spare room to give him a room of his own. He picked the things to go into it. That meant a great deal. If we had not had the guardian's payment, we would not have been able to do that. My husband works but he is paying all the bills. I am lucky in that my husband is still working. I am a young grandparent. There are grandparents who are not in my situation, people who are ten, 15 or 20 years older and who are not working. In these cases, there can be two pensioners not getting any payment while bringing up one, two, three and sometimes four young children, who grow into teenagers and who need lots of things these grandparents cannot provide.