In some bleak city suburbs, mothers live in fear of their own children, who are out of control. However well they are reared, children know there's no hope of them having a better life elsewhere. Kathryn Holmquist reports on the efforts of parents' groups to secure 'basic human rights' for their families

There's no hope for parents in Quarryvale in west Dublin because "there's not a hope in Hell of moving out", says Geraldine, who has two children, aged 23 and 18, living at home. One of her children has recently returned home, after a period of homelessness precipitated by Geraldine's decision to take out a barring order against him. Like some other mothers in the area, she had to use the law to protect herself from her son's threatening behaviour.

The view from her window depresses her: roaming gangs of vandalising youths, children drinking and smoking hash in the green spaces, "joyriding" and burnt-out cars. Children steal cars in the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre, then drive them to the estate, where they show off their driving skills.

Summertime brings more mayhem - ramming Garda cars and drinking in the open spaces until 4 a.m.. Geraldine has rescued two people from suicide attempts and intervened when a young mother ended up on life support after an overdose, leaving her young children to cope for themselves. She is a member of a parents' group active in Quarryvale, which has been trying to improve life for the community with the help of the North Clondalkin Partnership.

Joyce, another member of the group, has nine children, several of them drug addicts. She is expert at restarting their hearts after overdoses, and demonstrates the technique of using the fist to massage the chest just below the collarbone. She has had to revive one son on eight occasions. She found another son hanging nearly lifeless from a rope. Her feeling is that the authorities don't care. When one of her sons ran away from home at the age of 11, she went to the Department of Education and the health board to get help, but there was none available.

"Our kids are left walking the streets and no one gives a damn. The social workers? I don't even speak to them. You could wait three or four months for an appointment. The guards are just as bad, saying 'you're like your kids, you're scum'," she says.

She has hired lawyers in attempts to get her children into rehab and has written to local representatives, such as Mary Harney, begging the authorities to put her children away to protect themselves. Joyce knows why her children turned to drugs: "Eighteen years ago, people came from the inner city and the high-rises in Ballymun to live in 730 houses with one school and a shop-van. They put people into a concrete jungle and now they wonder why there's a problem," she says.

"We don't want to win the Lotto, we just want basic human rights. Quarryvale is a concrete jungle of oppression," says Rosetta Dempsey, co-ordinator with the North Clondalkin Partnership, which has "empowered women to support each other". Dempsey and other mothers have learned to hug their children, to praise and compliment them - new ideas for mothers who were never overtly loved themselves. The mothers have learned that children have rights and that, above all, their children's descent into depression and drug abuse is not their fault.

Dempsey says it is heartbreaking to see parents afraid of their own children's violence, to see grandparents asking health boards to put their grandchildren into care, and to see five- and six-year-olds so disenchanted that they already believe "police are pigs".

The partnership has produced a study, in co-operation with people involved in the Quarryvale Community House Project, entitled Community Planning for Better Health: A Study of the Community of Quarryvale, North Clondalkin. On Quarryvale's wish-list are a park, youth activities, a football pitch, a swimming-pool, affordable childminding facilities, a chemist, post office, health clinic, phone boxes, a library and summer activities for children. A supermarket is among the most basic needs. Parents have to get on a bus to go to Blanchardstown to shop, because the local food store in Liffey Valley -- Marks & Spencer - has little more than gourmet delights that people on limited incomes cannot afford.

People in Quarryvale want to feel safe; they want to be crime-free, drug-free and to feel "happy and proud". They want to see waiting-lists in addiction clinics eradicated and immediate treatment for those seeking help. They want to prevent crime through early intervention for all young people showing negative behaviour. They want counselling and drug treatment programmes without waiting-lists. They'd like to see an end to housing waiting-lists and the provision of holiday houses where families under stress can go for periods of rest and relaxation.

The women involved in the study know why they are the way they are. They also know how to fix it. Their frustration comes from being trapped in a vicious circle of poverty that makes them feel like outcasts. For those who rear their children well, helping them to beat the odds and stay off drugs, there's still little hope of the children having a better life anywhere else.

Housing is a major issue. If children succeed at school and get jobs, then continue to live at home with their parents, the rent goes up for the entire family. So the young people have no opportunity to save money for a mortgage.

The seeds of failure were laid a generation ago. Mothers in the Quarryvale project share a similar life path: as young women in their 20s and early 30s, they moved to the area with their husbands and children 18 years ago. The high unemployment rates of the 1980s meant that the men who had left school at 13 and 14 sat at home throughout the recession. They had literacy problems they were embarrassed to admit. The women, who were struggling to rear families in conditions of dire poverty, griped and complained to the men, who couldn't escape their houses without work and money. "The men were happy as long as we were pregnant," says one mother. Marriages broke down and some of the men left. Quarryvale became a community run by women, many of them now grandmothers.

"When I moved in here 17 years ago, I had great expectations," says Mary. "There was no playground for my young children; there's still no playground. There was no post office; there's still no post office. There was one shop-van; now there's one small shop in the community-centre building that looks like Beirut. The teenagers are left to their own devices. They're sitting on walls, drinking, robbing cars. The only time you ever see anything in the field is on Sunday morning, when some of the men organise sports."

Dempsey believes the environment makes parents' job almost impossible. "I think parents have to be responsible for their children. They have a responsibility to keep 11-year-olds in at night. But the system has to help the parents to be able to parent," she says. "You can have community development programmes etcetera, but put any child in that environment for 18 years and you will see a problem that will not cure itself in two or three years. The Government laid the ground for this problem when they put young families in an area with no facilities. How can you blame parents for not being responsible?"