Ireland Trips
Lost and Found
Our outreach worker, John is from Ballina in Co. Mayo and goes home every year for the Moy festival and although he hasn’t drank alcohol in nearly 40 years, while he is there he goes into the local pubs to see who else is around town. Last year he got talking to someone in a… Read More
The Last Pig in Ireland
A couple of days before we left London we went to clean the minibus and load up with water and soft drinks for the journey. Charlie would be making sandwiches on Friday night. At first John noticed the note placed under the windscreen wiper, then I noticed there was no wiper only a stump of… Read More
The Migrant Life
Aisling will be celebrating our 25th anniversary later this year. It is a great achievement to have kept going this long and not only are we planning to expand our service in 2019 we are as enthusiastic now as we were when we began in 1994. In the last quarter century we have worked with… Read More
The Rocky Road to Dublin and Beyond
Tommy, (AKA Nuts-and-Bolts) was missing and so his brother rang Aisling from Clare. He was worried about Tommy not having heard from him in years and so we set out to find him as best we could. The last connection we had with Tommy was at a sheltered housing scheme way out in the London… Read More
Moving to Galway
I have heard it said many times that dependency problems can be inherited along with many other personality traits and talents, physical attributes etc. After many years with Aisling we have noticed family traits repeated in later generations often jumping generations and leaping across family members. A very good friend of mine who I met… Read More
Pray for the Living
Driving around Ireland on our trip to Donegal this year we are constantly asked from lamp-posts, billboards and news media a very complex question with a stark either/or answer: Yes or No. Yes gives women the right to choose whether they should have the right to decide for themselves if they want to have a… Read More
Living Like The One Percent
Bob Geldof earned a lot of kudos for Band Aid and a lot of sympathy when his wife and daughter died but it seems that he has squandered a bit of both lately. He handed back his freedom of the city of Dublin award before Christmas to protest at the same honour being given to… Read More
Six Degrees Down to Zero
You may have noticed from previous postings that John our alcohol outreach worker seems to find a connection with everyone he meets wherever we go because it seems everyone in the world originated in County Mayo which is the real cradle of civilisation (Mayopotamia perhaps?). But on this trip we witnessed something a bit more… Read More
Hearts of Stone
Stephen’s sister was waiting for us when we got to Colbert station in Limerick after a 3 hour journey from Wexford. We managed to squeeze into a parking space on a double yellow line between two enormous Bus Eireann coaches. Many of us were in emergency need of a toilet break and ran into the… Read More