15 YEARS OF HEROIN ADDICTION CAPTURED IN PHOTO ALBUMS

The children whose parents died as a result of heroin are in danger of
becoming the new lost generation. CATHERINE CLEARY reports on how heroin
has destroyed one Dublin family

It is difficult to understand how Marie Dempsey opens her eyes, pulls back
the covers and gets out of bed every morning. In her two-bedroom
corporation house there are five children under 12 to care for. Her
35-year-old son has full-blown AIDS and an 18-year-old son with a heroin
habit is on a methadone programme. Eight of her 11 children are on drugs.
One of them died. Marie will be 60 this year.

Her daughter has third-stage AIDS. Two of the five children in the house
belong to this daughter. The other three girls were orphaned when Marie's
other daughter, Queenie, died in 1992.

If there is one thing that captures the legacy of more than 15 years of
heroin in Dublin it is Marie Dempsey's photo albums. There is her daughter
Catherine - everyone called her Queenie - at Portmarnock beach, tanned and
smiling.

There are photos of Queenie in a hospital bed, her shiny dark hair cropped
and matted. Then as she lay in bed at home, huge eyes staring out of a
caved-in face, two days before she died, aged 27. There is also a snapshot
of her coffin being pulled in an ornate horse-drawn carriage around the
south Dublin corporation estate, Rutland Grove.

Most harrowing are the Polaroids of her grand-daughter Lorna, Queenie's
third baby. They show the three-year-old, eyes closed, with her head on a
pillow, wearing a white satin dress. She could be sleeping, except for the
waxy grey skin. She is laid out in the dress given to her by staff at Our
Lady's Hospital for Sick Children. The nurses were "mad about her".

Marie believes Lorna was born with HIV. She died a year before Queenie.
Marie had just got her walking, having looked after the sick baby when her
mother couldn't cope. Both mother and daughter are buried in the same plot
in Mount Jerome, with Marie's father-in-law.

We sit in the kitchen beside an open fire, the only source of heat and hot
water in house. The grandchildren - who call her Mammy "when they're sick
or when they're fighting" - are glued to The Simpsons. The ashes of the
dead baby's father, who died a month before her, are in the front room.

Upstairs, Marie's son Thomas is in bed after being released the day before
from St James's Hospital where he was treated for pneumonia. Thomas started
taking heroin in 1982. "I didn't even know he was on drugs until he was 18
or 19. He was acting very strange."

Marie grew up around the corner from the infamous Dunne family. Larry Dunne
is blamed for flooding Dublin with heroin around the time her first child
started using. She is not angry with them. "The money was handy and they
got into that. I wouldn't blame them. It's up to the people themselves to
take drugs."

Thomas had been a good son who looked after his younger brothers and
sisters each time she went into hospital to have another baby. He left
school at 13 and got into heroin some time later. He tested HIV positive
almost 10 years ago.

"My fella started telling me I was encouraging them. I was kinda coping
with it. He was afraid - of the drugs and the sickness." Her husband left
and she kept coping.

On a Tuesday night in April 1992, after Marie had been caring for Queenie
for three years, she had just finished washing her and changing her bed
when her daughter said to her: "Ma, do you know I'm going to die!" I
answered: 'Yes, love.' Then she said: 'When I go you're not to worry'."

Queenie had picked out the Holy Communion dress for her eldest daughter,
but Marie knew she was not going to live long enough to see it. So they put
the dress on the child and sent her into the room, telling her to pretend
it was the Communion day.

Marie remembers making the child stand close to the wall so her mother
wouldn't lift the skirt of the dress to check for the frilly knickers she
had ordered specially. They had not arrived, and came three days later, the
morning Queenie died.

A nun and a social worker call to Marie's house. She spares the nun the
worst of her problems. "When I started telling her things she started
crying. She's real soft. So now I don't say anything to her at all." The
women who work at a community centre, Addiction Response Crumlin, call
every day.

Both Thomas and Queenie were good at sports. "I'd more trophies," Marie
says. Thomas was "grand until he was about 17. Then I'd the police at my
door. And they've been at my door ever since."

After Queenie's death, Marie featured in a TV documentary. She has many
friends who are bringing up children of their own, dying children. The
documentary won awards and she was paid £250 for her time and the use of
her home. Someone dropped in a box of chocolate biscuits and a plant.
Nothing has improved since then.

"An awful lot of people here know members of their families died of AIDS.
If they would open their hearts and talk about it then it would help. A lot
know their families are on drugs. They just don't want to admit it."

Last weekend, Queenie's eldest daughter made her Confirmation. She came
home with presents. "She hands me a box and says, 'It's for Mother's Day,
but I'm giving it to you today'." Inside was a chain with a small gold
heart, with "Mam" inscribed on it. Some years they buy two Mother's Day
cards, one for the grave and the other for their granny.

"They're just not getting what they should be getting in life." Last summer
they had a week's holiday in the country. "I want the kids to get a break
from us and for them to see something different."

Sometimes she feels like giving up. Last week she went into casualty after
she had a panic attack while she was in St James's Hospital with Thomas.

The rest of her children are living in Inchicore, a house she describes as
a hell-hole. Every day brings a new crisis. Sometimes it is "running up to
Inchicore to bring one of them to hospital." She is grateful that none them
has overdosed.

When she lived in Rutland Grove the gardai would raid her house regularly,
she says, looking for stolen property. They would stop her twin-tub washing
machine and tell her she was hiding jewellery in it. But everything her
children stole went on heroin, she says.

One night the vigilantes called, armed with bats and a gun, looking for a
boy that had been seen in a stolen car that had almost killed a child in a
flats complex.

She has bought methadone on the black market for her children. She knows
second-generation addicts who are on heroin after seeing their parents die.
"One woman has seven on drugs. Another has buried three sons and has two
daughters on drugs. She's rearing grandchildren as well." Marie worries
about the future for her own grandchildren.

No one has come up with a total number of heroin-related suicides,
overdoses and AIDS deaths in Dublin in the years since the early 1980s.
Some families are reluctant to admit a drug death.

In the north inner city they put the number at 104 at the end of 1997. In
Crumlin, the ARC project wants to put up a permanent memorial to their
dead. Signs in supermarkets ask parents who have lost a child to drugs to
come forward. But they have already had objections from residents to the
idea of planting a tree.

Her view of the "war against drugs" is bleak. "They'll never stop drugs
coming in here because there's too much money being made. They've left it
too late - the Government - to do anything about anything."