Trailblaze: Tourguides to the future: 22.9.2013

I work with THEATREclub.

We make socially engaged contemporary performance… OR… experimental plays about us and the people and things around us …OR… nights out that make you think etc.

When I was 9 years old I was playing in the front garden of our house in the south inner city of dublin. It was 1998. I found a syringe and I told my brother to close his eyes and open out his hand and I put the syringe in his hand.

Uproar. Me and me brother had a huge scrap.

My mother made us draw a picture of the syringe to identify what it was. She didn’t know whether it had really happened or whether the chaotic media reports were messing with our heads.

Every day people knocked on our door looking to borrow spoons. I once stole the leftover Christmas turkey to feed it to a group of alcoholics who used to hang around at the bookies. Their red faces terrified me. I thought they were really sick.

It was an open house. My parents had done a lot of work on themselves. In that house I learned how to empathise. I understood what addiction was. I was told that the men at the bookies were sick. They had a disease called al-cho-lism. My parents marched with other parents, maybe with your parents on drug dealers houses, but they stepped back when it got violent.

Through a community employment scheme, My mother went back to this institution and studied for a masters in Race and Ethnicity. I spent my childhood playing in this college, and on the streets of the inner city.

It wasn’t all rosy in the garden though. It wouldn’t be honest to stand up here and leave a part of the story out.  We had our problems in my family and we all suffered great trauma.

I was bullied.  I drank young. I smoked hash everyday of my secondary school education. I was arrested. I was more than three hours late every day for school, so much so that my principle eventually had to put me on a sort of flexi-time system, where I had to stay back whatever time I missed. I passed the leaving cert by the skin of my teeth, and I missed out on the opportunity to go to this college.

When I was 16 I joined Dublin Youth Theatre.  I can honestly tell you that changed my life. I met people there who weren’t like me, who came from different backgrounds, and it was the first place where it was okay to be whoever you were. The youth workers and artists I met there encouraged me to write, they saw that I was suffering and they encouraged me to tell my own story.

That’s important. The right to tell your story. The right to listen and be heard.

I am 24 years old now and for the last five years I have spent every waking moment of my life following my vocation to change the world through art.

We work often work ‘in the community’ making the work. Me and the ensemble of actors and designers collaborate with different groups to write the pieces.

This has been mostly in Rialto, Fatima Mansions and Dolphins Barn, where I grew up. In 2010 we made a piece called HEROIN, in collaboration with Rialto Community Drug Team. We told the story of the social history of the drug from the 1960s up to the present day, and we did that to make the point that no-one wakes up one morning and just decides to inject heroin into their arms. We wanted to stage the bigger picture, in all it’s complexity. The effect has been phoenominal for us, three years on and we’ll present  the fiftieth performance in Limerick next week.

We live in a fragmented society.

Drug users are the fragmented from the fragments, the disadvantaged among the disadvantaged. I have met hundreds of people who have used heroin.  I work alot with drug addicts. heroin users, heroin survivors. Notice the difference in the language. Notice the term of expression I am NOT using. What is it?

There’s power and politics at play in everything.

Language is very important. When I first started making the piece, I asked the people I worked with, if you could change one thing about how the rest of the world see’s you, what would it be? They ALL said that word.

It’s like the F word for gay people, the D word for gay women, the K word for travellers, the S word that Ross O’Carroll Kelly uses.  These are dangerous words.

I saw this as an opportunity- here was the potential for real tangible change. Most people used that word ignorantly, I used it myself.  They use it because the don’t know any better, maybe I could use theatre to bridge that gap.

I have never met someone addicted to heroin who has not been the victim of sexual abuse. That connection is tangible. heroin is a painkiller. The two epidemics run side by side, but the evening herald hasn’t made the connection yet.

There are 20,000 registered addicts in this country, and 30 detox beds. Metadone is cheap. Detox is expensive. We as a society are letting people down, just like we let their parent’s and their grandparents down. A whole generation of children who live in local authority housing are being raised by their grandparents because their parents are dead or in prison. And they will probably never vote. Notice I haven’t said the words ‘working class’ either. These are the new  ‘have never worked class’.

Most recently we’ve been working in St Michael’s Estate - towards a Public Art Commision. The piece is called HISTORY, and it looks at 90 years of failed housing policy on the land- this is not only the site of the infamous tower blocks, but also where the 1916 revolutionaries were brought and it was also home to Goldenbridge industrial school, where Christine Buckley was imprisoned.

The people of St Michael’s Estate, not 10 minutes drive from where you are sitting now, were promised regeneration four times, four seperate plans were proferred by the state and four times residents picked were their houses would go, what kind of tiles and curtains they wanted and four times those plans fell through. Most recently in 2008 when developer McNamara pulled out of a Public Private Partnership. The Irish State was about to sell that land to Bernard McNamara, over 400 houses would become 86, so he could build a LIDL and so more landlords could benefit from rent allowance, but then it all went belly up. For us all really.

I’ve been doing some work in limerick lately, and I’ve seen the bullet holes in peoples houses  The Island. I cried in the office of the woman who runs the residents forum, when she told me about the failings of regeneration in Moyross where you now have people living alone in whole avenues of boarded up and demolished houses due to years of feuding and the failing of the irish state to provide for the people.

Over twenty years in this city, and I know there are those here who will remember the headlines, we battled a heroin epidemic, brought about by a housing crisis, and the abuses of the catholic church who we trusted to care for children who emerged from those institutions so scarred they could never recover. We built and infrastructure of services, we marched for change, we talked about regeneration and progress, and systematically over the last two years, the government have been cutting those services.

Kathy and Claire asked me to talk about unsung heroes. If you saw change over the last twenty years, it was because of the addiction workers, the community development, the family resource centre, the community employment scheme my mother enrolled in, the YOUTH THEATRE that I was a part of all of which are being ripped apart by austerity, and thats not in the news - they are getting away with it because in our society these people don’t have a right to tell their story, they are not being heard.

How can we justify, targeting the most vulnerable in our society in one the biggest economic disasters of our history? It just makes me feel like going are you for real? 11 community addiction workers lost their jobs in the last five years in the canal communities, and we are paying off a bank guarantee of millions, of a figure which some chap said on TAPE that  he PULLED OUT OF HIS ARSE.  

We are fragmented, we are seperated, and thats what I do. I try to join those spaces together, I am a messenger. I think if we just knew more about each other things would be different. I’m  not an idealist, I don’t have a bleeding heart and I am certainly not a pollyanna…. 

I want to bring these stories together. I think that is how I can be part of how this could all change. I am definitely not a pollyanna. Its hard right now to be glad about anything.

I was thinking about being blessed to be asked to be your tour guide to the future. I think in  this country we are obsessed with the past and the future often because the present moment is unbearable. It is existentially impossible to quantify, and through talking about the past and projecting about the future we gain some comfort.

We have to look at the present moment before we can even begin to imagine the future. We have to be brave and stand up and take responsibility for our neighbours. This is a small island and your address impacts too much on your opportunities. Having spent the last few weeks in Limerick, and the last year in St Michael’s Estate, I can tell you that unless we stand up and take action, unless we protect the services that changed our city over the last twenty years, history is most definitely going to repeat itself. And it is it us. the people in this room who will write it as much as it is anyone else.

I’m going to finish with a quote by Brendan Ryan, who was Chairperson of St Michael’s Estate Task Force in 1998, the year I found a needle in my garden. This is a quote from HISTORY that will premiere at the end of the year and it sums up what gets me out of bed in the morning these days so I want to read it for you now.

It is a commonplace assumption among what we call “opinion formers” that there are no heroes in the world anymore. We are all, we are told, limited and limiting. There is no one with a vision, no one with courage, no one with commitment or a heart that never gives in.

As far as the powerful, the significant and the influential go, all that is probably true.Today’s heroes live among the grass roots in the spaces ignored by the great and the vocal. They struggle with ignorance and being ignored. They refuse to go into the boxes to which state and media consign them. And they never give in. St Michael’s Estate is full of such heroes and heroines, people who are indestructible and still full of hope, people who tolerated alot, suffered too much but were never defeated either by the state or by those who the state allowed to come among them. This report is their story told by themselves. It is a story of their pride and our shame, a story of hope and sometimes passing moments of despair. Above all though it is a story of life and of hope which comes not from promises or platitudes but from a determination that things have to be made better.

See us soon? 

HEROIN this week Lime Tree Limerick http://bit.ly/LimeTreeHEROIN

A double bill as part of The Trilogy: A Story about Ireland this October in Axis Ballymun, The Family & HEROIN back to back… http://bit.ly/dbaxis