Pride and purpose for Fatima

The regeneration of Fatima Mansions in Dublin is a massive step forward for the community, but many fear progress will halt if social funding is stripped away in the impending Budget

IT WAS a bittersweet moment for life-long Fatima resident and veteran campaigner Deirdre Reid when President Mary McAleese described the rejuvenated Fatima Mansions as “the best place to grow up in” last week.

For Reid, Fatima, as the community is now known, was indeed the best place to grow up in, and she has reared four children there. Yet, while the new housing and its centrepiece – a state-of-the-art neighbourhood complex with gym, swimming pool and all-weather pitch – have brought pride to those who have fought for it over the past decade, the upcoming Budget is being awaited with fear.

Reid is one of the community workers concerned that the social supports required will be withdrawn in the Budget, following recommendations in the McCarthy report that the Family Support Agency and Community Employment schemes be axed.

Reid, a community liaison worker paid by the Family Support Agency, gestures around the busy neighbourhood centre, with its glossy wooden floors, artwork and huge barn doors that slide open onto the green. “Without staff, there will be nothing here but an empty building,” she says. If funding for staff is to be cut, all of the supports that should make Fatima Mansions “the best place to grow up in” would disappear, she believes.

Rejuvenating people is as important as rejuvenating buildings, in her view. Without funding for staff, there would be no more homework club, creche, art programme, complementary health programme, senior citizens’ club, lifelong learning programme or music programme. These activities enrich lives, and they are also portals through which vulnerable people can find others who will listen and respond to their needs, Reid explains.

“That’s what happened years ago. Buildings were refurbished but there was no social plan, so the redevelopment didn’t work,” says Reid, who has been a liaison between residents and Dublin City Council for the past decade.

Fatima Groups United, a representative body of residents and community groups, of which she is a member, has long argued that physical regeneration cannot transform people’s lives without social regeneration.

When heroin took hold of Fatima in the 1980s, entire families were devastated, she says. “There were strangers in and out, it was in your face – a few families were devastated by it. When my kids seen how people was, people walking around like zombies, I honestly believe it kept [my children] away from it.” There were families that “no one wanted to live beside” because dealers and people from outside Fatima Mansions were coming and going to buy smack.

Concerned Parents, a group set up by parents who wanted to see drug dealers evicted from the flats, became a controversial force.

Mothers would lock themselves in their bedrooms with their TVs so that their children, shooting up smack in the sitting room, couldn’t steal their TVs and sell them to pay for drugs. Reid, whose four children, aged 14-23, are all in full-time work or education, feels fortunate that none of them succumbed.

Reid herself left school at 14, without doing her Junior Cert, to work as a factory seamstress. With her own children, she has insisted that they stay in school unless they have an apprenticeship to go to. When “we cut the deal”, as she puts it, with Dublin City Council, boys from Fatima were to be offered work on the building of the site. Two of her boys left school to get jobs building the new Fatima, and the eldest of them now works for the council. He also has his own apartment in the scheme, thanks to negotiations conducted by Fatima Groups United. This was another part of the deal, offered to all families. Reid was entitled to a four-bedroom house, but was also given the choice of a three-bedroom house and an apartment. She chose the second option, so her eldest son now has his own apartment as well as a secure job.

Another of her sons, Christopher (19), is studying music at Ballyfermot College at diploma level, and plans to pursue a degree at Dundalk Institute of Technology . He wants to open a recording studio in Fatima. He has his eye on an empty corner shopfront.

Most of the shopfronts in the complex are empty, but in one, Deirdre Reid’s brother, Bill Reid – father of footballer Andy Reid, the Republic of Ireland midfielder – has opened a taxi company, “Reidy’s”. Bill rents the premises from Fatima Groups United and the initial investment to open the business came from his son. “It gives us a sense of security,” says Deirdre Reid, referring to the residents’ need for transport 24 hours a day (they also have a Luas stop). The taxi company is open 24 hours and, Bill Reid says, another part of offering security is that staff keep an eye out for anti-social behaviour, while the firm also provides employment.

Making Fatima work for the families that live there, in terms of providing jobs and an environment that young people will want to continue to live in, is essential to maintaining the social fabric that can bring Fatima back to the golden days of the past, Deirdre Reid believes. “People’s lives are turning around completely. [There are] families here who were really, really vulnerable, and if we hadn’t stepped in . . . now their lives are completely turned around. The whole family is transformed.”

Growing up in Fatima in the 1960s was idyllic, as she describes it. In her parents’ three-bedroom flat there were six boys in one bedroom and three girls in the other. Reid saw seven of her brothers and sisters leave Fatima to live elsewhere, but she has remained. She has such a love for the place that, after she had been relocated and her own flat was, without her knowledge, one of the first to be demolished, she was seen weeping on RTÉ news.

People in the old Fatima Mansions, despite the problems of some vulnerable families, had a closeness that she believes must be maintained in the new Fatima if it is to be a good place for children to grow up in.

In the past, the mothers kept watch from the landings, making sure that everyone’s children were looked after. “I miss the flats, that closeness. The new houses [are] beautiful, don’t get me wrong. You’d always see someone down the block [in the flats] playing, or someone you knew out on the balcony. We’re still close; now we’re all working together, and our kids are pals together.”

Reid has found the experience of liaising between Dublin City Council and the people of Fatima “very stressful”, and says that her experience of being a tomboy playing football growing up helped to toughen her up. She knocked on the door of every resident, often working until 11pm at nights, to keep residents informed of what was going on and to let them know that they were being looked after.

“The hardest part was keeping secrets – knowing details of families, knowing which buildings would go first, which would get new housing first, was very hard, holding things in. It was very stressful – neighbours or family were saying it’s never going to change, it will never happen, and we had to keep them on board. It was very stressful working in the community – they blame you for everything.”

It was the street festivals held in Fatima that really made the difference in terms of keeping people on board, she says. “Festivals helped involve people . . .we would target people who didn’t get involved, maybe they were vulnerable or shy, and bring them in the next time.”

Today, she says, she sometimes meets people who left Fatima and have visited the new complex. “I wish I’d never left,” they tell her.

For the 110 social housing units and 40 apartments of Fatima to be left after the Budget as nothing more than abodes for people, without the help of the homework clubs and other community supports, “would be stripping the heart out of [Fatima]. It [the Neighbourhood Centre] would be a locked up building, which would be a shame.” She can see the prospect of drugs coming back in, because there are still “very vulnerable” people living in Fatima, and the economic situation is worsening.

People on Community Employment Schemes, Reid points out, have had their self-esteem and personal circumstances improved. (They get social welfare payments as well as money for working on the schemes.) Leaving them with social welfare payments alone would be a backward step, not just due to the drop in their income, but because it would also devalue their roles in the community, she says.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t working. I’m in a job I love doing,” she adds.