I get up very early but I don't make a big thing out of it. You can be just as effective getting up at twelve o'clock in the day. It's just that when I was going to school I had to be up early to go through the fields or to go to the market and I had to be up early when I was a nurse.

I try to meditate every morning for 20 minutes before I go out. It does certainly help. I can't describe it. You are very slowed down and very alert at the same time. You can think very clearly and you have vivid dreams.

Walking through Rathmines I count six colleges, three churches, two Garda stations, two army barracks. In the middle of all this there is no big community centre.

Then I go by the canal. I believe if you keep in touch with nature, things growing, things dying, there's always that sense of people have gone that way before us. You never lose the run of yourself. Anything we are saying now has all been said before.

Going down Heytesbury Street there's one man always out brassing his brasses with great pride. Walking down the street suddenly you see a snail coming out of a garden and you stop in your tracks.

I read an awful lot. The media and technology remind us we are part of a bigger picture. What's recorded today on the media is there forever with technology. That means the lives of people we work with every day aren't lost.

I think the media and writers now are much more important than the sociologists and researchers. Writers and the media go behind the statistics.

All of us, Gerry, Patrick, Noel, Evelyn and myself try to have a cup of tea together before we open. We try to give ourselves that few minutes. When the door opens, anything can happen, anyone can come in. We would never know who's going to come in a day.

By lunchtime the place is very dirty and can be smelly. Everyone is tired by lunchtime. Then I could be going to visit a prison or to meet someone. I don't see work as something that's nine to five clocking in and clocking out. I would see work as very much a part of life.

Later, I usually go for a walk down by the river, and I would often meet people heading for the bushes and I would say hello and they would be surprised I have called them by their first name.

Others mightn't want you to recognise them on the street because they might be with someone.

I'm very lucky because my husband Charlie is retired and he has my dinner ready for me which is great. I am writing a novel which will probably never see the light of day. I'm also trying to work on the Internet. I have Kelly Birmingham teaching me. She did a social-care course at Ballyfermot and I helped her at it. Now she's helping me. She doesn't make me feel stupid.

I find going to the theatre isn't in any way relaxing any more, because I don't see anything now on the stage that I haven't seen at work.

In conversation with Padraig O'Morain