Patrick (32), from Newry, Co Down, woke up to Christmas morning in a Dublin carpark. A heroin addict for six years, he moved to Dublin nine years ago and has been homeless "for about three years".
Yesterday afternoon saw him crouched on St Stephen's Green at the top of Dawson Street, a sleeping bag across his knees and a polystyrene cup between his raw red hands in the bitter cold.
"I woke up about half seven, in bits," he said of Christmas morning. "Hadn't any gear [heroin] so I was `dying sick', aches and pains in my legs and stomach. It's so painful you don't want to do anything, just want to kill yourself to stop the pain going through you," he explained. However, a friend - one of four others who sleep in the car-park - sorted him out.
"Luckily one of the boys came in with a score and we went `halfsies'. Then I got a bag [£20 worth of heroin] later so I was able to get him back."
When he first came to Dublin Patrick had a job and a place to live. Three years later a colleague in the Grafton Street shop where he worked introduced him to smoking heroin.
Within three years he was injecting and had lost his job, flat, girlfriend and access to his three children, two girls now aged four and a boy aged seven.
He missed them most keenly on Christmas Day but made no attempt to contact them.
"There'd only be war with her," he says of his ex-girlfriend. Instead he got the last bus, provided by Dublin Bus, to a dinner for the homeless at the RDS, from outside the Mansion House.
"It was turkey, gravy, stuffing, chips, peas and carrots," he says. "Then custard and pudding for dessert. They did about 12 or 20 busloads. Then they gave us a couple of cans each, a food parcel, and dropped us back into town. I just went back to the car-park then."
Patrick last spoke to The Irish Times just before Christmas when he said he was living in a squat in Harcourt Street. Another person living there, however, "tried to kill himself by setting the place on fire".
"He burnt the mattresses and all, so he did," says Patrick in his half-Dublin, half-Northern accent.
The car-park is "freezing", but "sheltered, out of the rain, and you go down the back and try to keep warm." The others sleeping there are from Dublin, he says, aged between 22 and 29, two young women and two men.
Asked where he sees himself next Christmas, Patrick says simply: "Off the streets". Asked where he thought last Christmas he would be this Christmas he smiles and nods.
"Yeah, I didn't think I was still going to be here, but here I am."
