Once the formalities are over we get straight down to the reasons she placed the ad. ‘I have been in difficult relationships and I have friends who have also,’ she tells me. ‘For most counselling sessions, it’s €70 an hour. If I had €70 to spend on myself for counselling it would have saved me a lot of hassle. But like most people, I couldn’t afford that. And then apart from the money, when they go for counselling sometimes people get told all sorts, like they can’t have an addiction before going into relationship counselling and so on. There’s a lot of reasons why you have an addiction and often many of them are because of what you are going through. So, both are interlinked and I want to make it easier and more affordable for people to get help.’
Joan is the kind of person all her friends turn to when they have an issue. She’s not qualified as a counsellor, although she has taken courses in psychology and social work, but she feels she offers a shoulder to cry on. The idea of the service she’s now offering is that people with problems can contact her and she will offer sound, non-judgemental advice over the phone and then, if the recipient should feel like giving her money, she will accept a donation for her time.
Even though she’s barely into her thirties, she has met so many people who are traumatised as a result of relationships. The common thread with many of them is that they don’t know what they want from partners, and they keep going into new relationships and repeating the same mistakes over and over again. They never press ‘reset’ and that’s where she comes in.
‘A lot of women I know over 30 still pick stupid men,’ she says, bluntly. ‘I would love to educate men, and women, on what is right and what is not. People have a concept of love. Most don’t have a fucking clue what it is. They say, “Oh I love him” and yet he could be kicking the shit out of them. That’s not love, it’s not even close.’
During the hour or so we spend together she talks at a hectic pace, jumping from subject to subject, landing on sentences like a cat toying with a mouse. She is refreshingly honest – and idealistic perhaps in terms of placing the ad and hoping for the kind of responses she expected. But she’s not naive. Far from it. For the first 20 minutes that we’re chatting she riffs on relationships, and when she’s not speaking from experience, she’s telling me about choices friends have made.
‘To me love is being in a relationship and you don’t have to worry about it, and you don’t have to worry about not trusting him either,’ she says. ‘You’re not thinking about their temper, and you can bring them out and they won’t cause a scene. Love is knowing they care about you, knowing that they will make you laugh and that they are good for your mental health. That’s love.’
On nights out she spends a lot of time observing the people in her group getting drunk, when underlying aspects of their personalities that are not always attractive really come to the fore. She doesn’t drink, but has more positive opinions on smoking weed.
‘I’m a loud person and I take in a lot of people’s behaviour. I watch why people behave the way they do. I don’t drink.’ She later speaks about her belief that smoking weed benefits some people’s lives. Not only does she believe that it helps some people function in certain social situations, but she’s also convinced it helps to overcome the trauma of past relationships. Putting on my rehab hat, I suggest that it must be just like any other addiction in terms of its impact. ‘Can you control addiction? No. But can you manage addiction so that it’s not completely fucking your life up? Yes.’
Maybe she’s got it figured out, but I’m not so sure. Fifteen years ago, when I was in rehab, I heard addicts (myself included) make all sorts of deals with themselves. Some alcoholics I knew convinced themselves that white wine with dinner didn’t constitute drinking alcohol! Many would tell me afterwards that smoking weed was not relapsing, despite the fact that whatever way you look at it, you are putting a mind-altering substance into your body.
I was so paranoid about relapsing after coming out of treatment that I don’t think I took a Nurofen or a Disprin tablet for about five years afterwards, for fear it might lead me back down the road to chaos again. So Joan believes that it is better to be addicted to some substances than others? Well, maybe that’s just the addicted mind making all sorts of deals with itself in order to remain in active addiction. Or maybe it’s true and we need to get away from the all-or-nothing view of rehab and living. Although the Catholic temperance society the Knights of Father Mathew tried mass abstinence programmes in the nineteenth century, they didn’t really have a lasting impact.
I’d often heard Joan’s argument made about so-called softer drugs. Over the years many people who have had alcohol problems have tried to convince me that smoking weed following treatment for alcohol addiction wasn’t an issue. I’ve no doubt that some went on to live less chaotic lives and managed to balance their relationships far better than before. For others, smoking a joint every other day eventually led back to the chaos and substance addictions they had previously escaped from.
I express my reservations about controlling any substance once you are an addict to my new counselling friend. She’s not buying it for one second. ‘Stoners are not the same as alcoholics,’ she tells me firmly. ‘Completely different drugs. It might be the same underlying reasons why they’re using it, but the outcome is different. Listen, dude, people won’t be losing their family over smoking weed, like. Some people are losing the plot before and that is nothing to do with addiction – it is often to do with a relationship. Smoke helps them not lose it.’
She says that she can understand why people remain in abusive relationships for long periods of time after what she has seen around her and the courses she has studied. ‘I know people in their twenties and they go through a lot of mental and physical abuse in relationships. Many do that and then swear never again,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it’s almost funny. You know when people don’t get what they want? They get all nice, then they get angry, and then all nice again and then angry. It is really funny to watch it; it’s like a circle.’
When you analyse this cycle closely, as she has done, she says it’s all to do with control. ‘At 16 or 17, when you meet your first real fella, if that is a bad one, it sets the tone, like, and you think, well, that’s what a relationship should be,’ she says. ‘I just think people need to be educated more and that’s partly why I want to reach out to others.’
Joan put the advert online just a few weeks before I met her. She asks for a nominal €10 payment, and feels that if she could have spoken to someone for less than €10 per session years ago, she would have done much better sooner. The idea came from wanting to help others avoid the mistakes she has made and to try and unravel a little more about herself through hearing from and interacting with others and their struggles. The responses so far have mainly been from men, which is not what she hoped when she posted the ad.
‘There was just one genuine guy who rang me and I was delighted as he was telling me about his sister and asking for advice. But in general, I think men got the wrong idea about the ad. Maybe they thought I was going to find someone for them? I had a man ringing me at all hours of the night – like, at four in the morning – so that wasn’t what I wanted.’
None of the men who contacted her forwarded any donations, and she was very disappointed with the responses. She thinks maybe she needs to rethink where to place the ad online, and while she would still like to help people, she’s a bit more wary now. I pose as a potential customer, and ask what advice she would give someone who phones and says they’re in a destructive relationship.
‘I’d ask them why can’t they get out of it?’ she says, ‘And then I’d tease out what brought them into it in the first place. When people come to me, I ask them if they can see any resemblance between the person they are with now and the person they were with on day one. Usually the answer is no.’
Sound, solid advice, I tell her. Why, though, if she is so keen to help others –
and I’ve no doubt how genuine her intentions are – doesn’t she train to be a professional counsellor and make it her career?
‘In the future, I would love to go to school,’ she says. ‘The thing is though I have a learning difficulty. I can’t put words on paper like other people can and I would have to pay €500 to get assessed again. I don’t have that money. There were nice thoughts that went into the ad and I did think men and women would benefit and that I could help. But really, I wasn’t prepared for how many creepy men would ring me though. I think men over a certain age think of the internet and just think sex. Every man was asking me was I with someone.’
The ad may have to be taken down and she’ll try to think of another route. In fact, as often happens with some of the more off-piste ads, I had been the first proper contact she’d made. She’s rethinking her strategy and has reality TV in her sights as inspiration. Naturally.
‘If people are dealing with abuse or they just want to come for relationship advice, how to find a nice guy or what guy would suit me, then I’m their woman to talk to. Although, I sometimes think maybe I should think of something different. Do you ever watch Million Dollar Matchmaker? I would love to set that up over here.’
Aside from her professional ambitions, these days she is years away from the difficult break-ups of her past and is in a good place relationship-wise. ‘I’m with a lovely person now,’ she says. ‘I pick my best friends as partners now. A lot of the men I was with weren’t always loved by my friends. I didn’t want to be hanging around with my fellas all the time or bringing them to places with my friends. With this guy now though, he is like my best friend. I can take him anywhere. He is trained! He is respectful and he loves me for who I am. I am loud and feisty and some men want to change that. Men get intimidated by me. My boyfriend is the most secure person in himself. He’s not paranoid. He’s not doubting himself all the time. That’s a key difference in that he doesn’t project whatever insecurities he may have on to other people. I know from experience if you’re with someone who is paranoid, essentially you’re with two people.’
And while her fella sounds like a mix between Prince William and George Clooney, she says she will be slow to marry or have a child with him, despite the fact that he’s very much in favour of it. ‘I don’t believe in divorce and I think people get married just for a ring now,’ she says. ‘My fella said our taxes would be lower – that nearly swung it for me! I would like to have kids but it frightens me. I am traumatised still. I would get healthier and fitter if I was pregnant. I’d never do it for myself but I’d do it for my kids.’
Trauma takes many forms. For some it can be a slow burn, while for others it can be a short yet sharp impact. Sitting across from me in the cafe is someone clearly dealing with ongoing and unresolved trauma, but who has managed remarkably well to continue being an employee, a partner and a forward thinker, despite the odds being stacked the other way. She knows deep down that she would love to have children. She knows too that her partner would be a great father. But she also knows that she cannot allow her trust to be breached again, and so she is living life in a controlled way, denying herself certain things in order to keep the demons and the unpredictable thoughts at bay. Or, as she explained in her wonderfully blunt way: ‘I said to him: “If we get married and have a kid, what if you become a total prick?” That happens to a lot of fellas.’
She says her nerves are not good and if, for example, the baby had colic, or was a poor sleeper, she’s not sure she would be able to cope. We talk about fitness and its benefits for positive mental health, and she tells me that because she is naturally thin, she is worried that too much exercise would make her too skinny. I force a ‘Yeah, I hate that’ smile, patting my middle-aged paunch, and pushing a half-eaten muffin away from me as if I’d never intended to devour it.
Arising from this casual conversation comes one final fact about her life. I ask if her thin body type is a genetic trait in her family? ‘Nah, I’m adopted,’ she says. ‘I met my birth mom once, when I was 21. I’m actually from Romania. The only way I would describe it is it’s like that place Borat is from in Kazakhstan – that’s exactly like where I’m from. It’s weird. When I was there I was looking around and they didn’t speak English and I had a translator and she wasn’t great. She wouldn’t say half the stuff I was asking my mother, like why did she have me adopted, why didn’t she keep me?’
She tells me that the meeting with her birth mother was fraught and not the fairy-tale reunion she had imagined as a child. The first thing she remembers her birth mother saying when they met was asking whether she could come back to Ireland with her. This obviously startled her and made the encounter tense.
She had had a pretty good idea about the circumstances of her adoption prior to meeting her birth mother. She knew, for example, that she was adopted at the age of two from an orphanage in Romania, along with two other children. While they all did well, she says they all had their unique difficulties to overcome, such as behavioural and psychological issues. Her background is complicated by the fact that her birth parents live apart and in very different circumstances.
‘My mom lives in a hut and my dad lives in a mansion,’ she says. ‘When I met her, she kind of hugged me but it was really weird. The story I’m told is that my dad moved away and took some of my siblings and I was left and they couldn’t afford to take care of me. I know my mother had nowhere to go and my uncles couldn’t keep me. I don’t blame her. I am glad though. My adoptive parents here were lovely. I love my mom and dad. As my dad said, there are lots of puppies in the kennels and they decided to choose one of them instead of making a new one! They were amazing people and made me the person I am today. And that’s why I really want to help other people.’
Now I understand why she wants to reach out to others. Many of her peer group are not aware of her background or ethnicity. She says it’s not that big a deal, and that her impressive command of Cork slang coupled with her strong accent means it never really comes up in conversation. She’s fixed and comfortable with her identity, rooted as she is in the People’s Republic. Sometimes though, when she’s in the city and she and her friends see other members of the Roma community, one of the group might mutter something about them, something racist. I tell her this must be really difficult for her – knowing that those closest to her are unknowingly criticising her heritage and identity.
Not for the first time, she responds in her unique way: ‘Nah, boy, doesn’t bother me. I say to them, “Shut the fuck up, would ya? That could be my aunt!”’
The Homeless Hotel
Looking for 2 plus bed property for homeless HAP €1,912. Hi, I am on homeless housing assistance payment (HAP), with a rate of €1,912 per month. I am a single mother with 2 children aged 4 and 5. We are in emergency homeless accommodation up the north side and spend 2 hours each day commuting to south side schools. I am also a full-time Masters student in UCD. I would be very grateful if there are any landlords renting in south Dublin or even the Bray area who would consider renting their apartment or house to me. The council will pay a deposit and one month rent up front, as well as a reliable and assured monthly payment, among other benefits. I can move in whenever and do not care if it is furnished or unfurnished, just looking for somewhere to live. Gumtree, January 2019
It’s 6.50 a.m. on a bitterly cold January morning, and I’m on a 100-metre walk with two children aged four and five and their mother. She’s a single parent in her early thirties, and she resents the icy air this early in the day because her youngest child has been coughing for the best part of a week, and was especially sick during the previous night. Every 30 seconds or so, the child had been consumed by a fit of coughing and as a result, the family had broken sleep all night. Coupled with this, the medication her daughter is taking is making her itch a lot. At least, she hopes that’s what it is. There’s always the concern when you’re not in your own bed as to who may have slept in it be
fore you, or what may be lurking under the well-worn mattress.
If this family were in their own home, they’d have it properly investigated and perhaps as a precaution get a new mattress and ditch the old one. But that’s not an option for them. The family lives in a hotel room: two small beds, one desk, one television, one mini-fridge, one kettle, one hairdryer. Two children and one adult. More often than not, they sleep in one bed in that room, so if one of them is sick, they all share that sickness and suffer. If one of them doesn’t sleep, none of them sleeps.
From this cluttered hotel room, where homework is done on mattresses and takeaway food is heated up in a microwave and made to last two days, they travel for almost two hours across the city to reach their school and crèche. Shamefully, they are one of hundreds of families in Dublin city who are being housed in hotels and B&Bs in Ireland in 2019, as the housing and homelessness crisis intensifies and shows little sign of abating.
Someone said to me in a recent interview that when you cut through the spin about Ireland’s ‘recovery’, our problems only became apparent when we began to house homeless people in hotels and tourists in homes. And there’s some truth in that. Almost two years before I met this family, the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Simon Coveney, made a commitment in March 2017 that no family would have to live long-term in a hotel room. Despite this, and some initial improvement in the statistics, the numbers are once again on the rise.
Back in the car park, once both children are belted in, we begin the journey from this hotel masquerading as a home on the north side of the city. Mary feels guilt every time she catches sight of her half-asleep children in the rear-view mirror. They should still be in bed, and yet here they are, without breakfast, being whizzed across the city, their normal childhoods flashing past as fast as the oncoming buses. Most mornings they drive first to her parents’ house, near where they used to live in their own home. This was before their landlord decided he could get more money from ‘professionals’ and told them they had to leave because he was selling the house. The for sale sign never went up and some weeks later, Mary saw the house re-advertised for an even more inflated monthly rent. This had been her home – it had been commodified and traded as if it were a sack of rice.
The Personals Page 16