Tiglin is a non-profit organisation with a Christian ethos that supports people to recover from addiction. It recently introduced a module on community development to its aftercare recovery programme and Eimear* from Bray, Co. Wicklow, has been through the programme. She spoke to Changing Ireland (using a pseudonym).
She said her father was alcoholic and he stopped drinking when she was aged 4.
“But I had his traits, because when I was 11, I picked up my first drink. Everyone used to say I was wild. I’d be drinking all the time, and when I got a bit older, I’d be partying and it spiralled out of control, to the point where I lost everything. I lost my house, I lost my job, I lost everything.
“It was through my sister’s persistence that she got me to the door of Tiglin. I went in there straight off the streets and I was very traumatized when I arrived.
She said that as well as drinking and taking street drugs she was also on psychotic medication.
“So you’re detoxing on that as well. For the first two to three months, I was shell-shocked. I didn’t know where I was. I wasn’t even broken, I was shattered, and they put me back together again.
“It’s a really tough programme, but one of the highlights was that we do therapeutic programmes, and we do rehabilitation classes and stuff like that.
“I did a foundation in adult learning, which was great, because I hadn’t any other qualification bar the Leaving Cert. To actually learn how to learn again was really good.
“I did communications, and enabling health and wellbeing, and critical thinking, and then community development. It took the focus away from the therapeutic stuff. It was good to focus on something else, and you come out with a certificate at the end of it. It doesn’t look bad on your CV.
“The community development one spoke to me more than any of them. The tutor John Balfe was different from any other tutor that we’ve had. He was different in the approach to took.
“He basically sat us down on our first lecture and said, ‘Right I’m gonna meet you where you’re at.’ He said, ‘We’re going to teach this to you however we can get it to you’.
“We’re all coming from different backgrounds – some people are coming from prison, some people are coming from the streets. We have different addictions. And we’re all coming from very different upbringings as well.
“There were some people on the first day saying, ‘I’ve no interest’, ‘Not interested’, and ‘Not gonna really put anything into this’ – and by the end of it they were all loving it. We all passed it and we all got our certificates.
“Instead of death by PowerPoint, it was interactive learning. We were brought out on the streets – John had us walking around Greystones taking photographs on ‘poverty walks’ and on ‘wealth walks’,” she said.
During these walks, the group took photos that to them represented poverty, or wealth, and later discussed what they saw as a group, with the aim of identifying ways they could help the community.
“We did everything as a group,” she added.
She made friends for life: “I trust them 100 per cent. They know me inside out. They’ve supported me through difficult times and they’re very special people,” said Eimear.
Tiglin has a Christian ethos and attendees must take part in religious services. Nonetheless, it has a good reputation, according to people we spoke to, including an independent HSE addiction support worker. The residential courses it runs are for a longer duration than most treatment centres.
Wicklow’s proof that community development works in addiction recovery
