Even before he hanged himself in a Dundalk guest-house most people in Carrickmacross had an opinion on the second son of local property developer Cathal Birdy. They just had different things to say about him.

In one of the pubs in the Co Monaghan town from which Gavin Birdy was barred, a young man talks about the shift in local perception.

"You would hear people, especially older people, talking about Gavin before. I know that when he came out of prison a couple of months ago his youngest brother went everywhere with him and Gavin was snubbed all over the town. It made me laugh to see them at the funeral, they didn't want to know him when he was alive," he said.

Locals had good reason to be less than impressed with Gavin Birdy, but when his Dad stood up in the local church last Sunday and read his son's suicide note out loud, past events were rendered irrelevant.

"I don't want this life on me or you and I have no control over it," he wrote. "I really do love you family and I know this is best for us." The final part was underlined. "The drugs got in the way," he wrote.

Like the eight to ten thousand people identified in the Eastern Health Board region this week, Gavin had a £200-a-day heroin addiction. It made him notorious in a town like Carrick where he stole from his own home and the homes of his closest neighbours.

It landed him in Mountjoy and then Wheatfield Prison where he underwent drug treatment programmes and tried to get clean.

Gavin came from a small rural town where, even when going through the worst kind of withdrawal symptoms, he could find his fix in the space of half an hour.

He also came from a prosperous, middle-class family. This drug addict didn't fit neatly into perceived demographic or socio-economic divides.

When approached, Cathal Birdy was polite but firm. He didn't want to talk to any more reporters. He had "had enough". The publicity wasn't what he had been looking for when he read his son's final words in the church.

He wanted the community to know that despite everything, Gavin was loved by his family and that Gavin had loved them back. His son didn't want the pain, didn't want the family to feel the pain. So Gavin ended it. An act of love more than despair. As he said, the drugs got in the way.

Earlier in the week, Mr Birdy told RTE radio's Liveline that he had five sons but that Gavin had taken up more time than any of them. He had always been adventurous, mischievous. "He was a wayward little gasun. The devil was always in him," he told another reporter.

The first time Gavin was arrested and charged was after he and a group of friends pulled up some trees that his father, a prominent member of the tidy-towns committee, had planted.

Through adolescence and even before, he had been involved in incidents far too serious to be described as mischievous or adventurous. But Gavin looked like an angel with his pure blond hair. He would say he was sorry, that he never meant any harm. And then he would smile.

It was the same at Inver College in Carrick. Gavin never settled at the mixed secondary school he joined when he was 12. Pat Drury is still headmaster and remembers suggesting to his parents that Gavin be moved to a school outside the locality.

"I thought it might be good for him to be away from all the people he knew and to make a fresh start. There was nothing bad about Gavin at all, it is just that some people don't fit into the formal education system. He was one of them. He was disruptive, but he was bright and he had lots of friends. The girls especially," he said.

He continued writing to his female friends from a boarding school just outside Portlaoise. He lasted a year there before being sent home. At 16 he began working in the town as a carpenter.

After a few years he left Carrick for England where he worked in the building trade. It was there that Cathal Birdy believes his adventure-seeking son first took ecstasy. When he came back he was different. "There was a change on him," he said.

There is a strong Garda presence in Carrickmacross, a district headquarters covering several local towns. Gardai say that there are drugs in the area but that any seizures they have made have been small hauls of ecstasy, acid, speed and other so-called designer drugs. Heroin has never been seized. A serious drugs problem, they say, would be reflected in the crime rate, which in Carrick is relatively low.

"If there was anyone going around strung out on heroin we would know about it," said one source. They knew about Gavin Birdy. At first he took ecstasy and went to raves in Armagh and Dundalk. Then, says his father, someone told him about smoking heroin to come down off ecstasy. When he started injecting and the habit became more expensive he stole cheque-books from his parents. Worse than that, his father has said, he stole from their neighbours. Gavin was out of control.

He was on his way home from a disco in Dundalk when he was in the car accident from which he received a substantial compensation award. This eventually was to be used to pay for his increasingly expensive addiction.

In one six-month period he spent between £50,000 and £60,000 on heroin.

"I saw the car after the accident," said one local. "I remember wondering how Gavin could have got out of it."

He spent time in Galway and Dundalk where he continued to steal or deal drugs to feed his habit. His parents contacted almost every treatment centre in the country to get help for their son. He would stay at a centre for an hour, or a week. Two at the most.

At his worst, Gavin was six stone; and with hardly a vein left to inject himself, he came home and his parents watched over him, helping him through cold turkey. Gavin would somehow escape the house and return within an hour, having found the heroin he now needed, not for the buzz, but to get by.

When Gavin was arrested and sent to prison for drug-dealing in Dundalk it was, in a way, a blessing for his parents. He taught himself to play the guitar in Mountjoy and took the help offered there to quit drugs. He is thought to have been off heroin when he was released from prison three months ago. But within a month he had started again.

At Gavin's old school, Leaving Certificate students tell you that you can get "whatever drugs you want" in Carrick. In both secondary schools in the area students from first to sixth years are part of an information course on drugs called SAP.

"We mirror our society in this school," says the headmaster, Pat Drury. "If there are drugs out there we have to prepare our students and educate them about the issues."

Local sources confirm that there are other heroin addicts in Carrick. One man was able to list the names of three or four. There are those who would like to see a treatment clinic set up in the area but express fears that it would attract addicts from other towns and increase crime in Carrick.

One source said that between Carrick and Kingscourt eight miles away there are at least 12 heroin addicts. Like Gavin Birdy, who had £30,000 of his compensation money left when he died, many of them are from middle-class and reasonably well-off families. And there are places nearby where the drug they crave is freely available for sale.