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He’ll eat plenty of snacks as well and double helpings at mealtimes. There seems to be nothing wrong with him though. He just works off the food throughout the day.

Peter started out as a returnee with Aisling but has since become a valuable member of the team. He comes with us on each trip now as a volunteer and we couldn’t do without him. As well as the cleaning he also, in many ways reflects the spirit of Aisling. Each year we are in Wicklow Peter goes to visit Eileen Hayes who was a neighbour of Peter’s mother and still lives in the small village in the south of the county. Peter was brought up by nuns and brothers from the day he was born and didn’t know his mother until he returned to Ireland, fifteen years after escaping from the John of God brothers and going to England as a teenager. Peter’s mother couldn’t handle Peter turning up in the small community, with suspicious priests and nosy neighbours gossiping about this shameful cloud from her past. And she had sent him away. He returned once more hoping for a reconciliation but she sent him away again. Since his mother died Peters only connection with his family is through Eileen who was the neighbour who first took Peter in when he came looking for his mother all those years ago. Peter has quite an extended family with many cousins still living in the local area and Eileen decided to contact someone in his family for Peter who was desperate for any family connection. Michael rang Peter last Christmas Day in Arlington House and they talked for 2 hours. He is Peter’s first cousin, being Peter’s mother’s sister’s son and he invited Peter to stay during this trip.

We drove to Eileen’s place first where we had tea. Her son was married to a woman in Australia last month and there was to be a blessing in the coming week at the local church and she was expecting 12 in-laws over from Australia later that evening but she had time to sit and chat for a couple of hours. She told us how to get to Michael’s house and off we went. Peter was feeling a little nervous so I knocked on the farmhouse door on the lonely road and was greeted by Lea, Michael’s wife. We were expected, Michael had taken the week off from his job as a postman and his son Ger had finished work early in Dublin to come out to meet Peter. Ger is 26 and so there is 20 years between him and young Michael the youngest of the family. There was another small child, Danny, living with them whom they had fostered. The family had fostered many children over the years and that thought comforted me on the way back to Blessington, that and the genuine warmth they had shown Peter, the two young lads particularly taking to him right away. After all these years it’s hard not to feel protective towards someone like Peter who has never had a family but wants one more than anyone I have ever met. Why do they want to meet Peter now? Do they know about the compensation from the Redress Board? Is it something to do with his mother’s will? But no, I think the whole family was affected by the sense of shame that Peter’s mother felt for the one time in her life she was with a man. Peter was a subject to be shunned during her life and even for some years after her death. So it was significant that when two days later Michael and Lea along with the young Michael and Danny brought Peter back to Blessington, they seemed like a real family, for Peter at last had found the warmth of his own blood.

Contacts had been made over the weeks before the trip to families and friends in Ireland and for the first few days other reunions were being arranged and cars kept coming and going. Jim’s sister lived in a Georgian mansion not far from Blessington and he spruced up and went to visit her for dinner one evening with a sneaky can in his pocket. Eddie’s niece offered herself as a mediator between him and his estranged sister so that they could go to visit their other sister together in Clare. The first sister had also married well and her husband owned a chain of garages but she did not part easily from her money. When they returned it had not gone too well. Eddie was under severe strain and he sneaked out to Dublin the next day and got roaring drunk for the first time in months. He felt bad about it later and told us that he his sister had expected him to pay for the whole trip including petrol money and roadside refreshments.

Michael’s sisters arrived from Kildare and were surprised at the deterioration in him. Though they hid it well they were shocked and told Charlie later that they couldn’t believe how much weight , hair and teeth he had lost. Michael was a new client for us and he had been recently referred from an alcohol project in South London, so we had no idea what he was like when the sisters had met him in London a few years ago. The problem seemed to be that he wasn’t eating since he had moved to his own flat away from the hostel where meals were provided, saving his money for drink. He was eating like a horse now, almost as if he was storing it up for later when he returned to London. We will need to keep in touch and see can we organise meals on wheels or something when we get back.

Tom had arranged to meet his sisters in Clery’s department store in O’Connell Street and this seemed like a good opportunity to see would Steve come into town to meet his mother. He agreed that we could ring his sister Patricia, which we did. Her son answered the phone and seemed very vague and disinterested in the news that his uncle was home but I managed to leave our number anyway, thinking teenagers are the same the world over. However, Patricia got back to me a few minutes later. She’d been out to the shops, the first time she’d left the house in days, because her son was dangerously ill, he’d had a burst appendix a week ago and nearly died. She was delighted Steve was home and would try to get out to her mother’s house if we could take Steve there. Steve had relaxed a lot since his whiskey binge on the journey and was taking his time drinking cans of Guinness and even eating the odd meal. His body was regaining some of its strength and when we went out on trips now he was hopping into the van without any help (just as well as the hydraulic lift had stopped working). Off we went to Dublin then. We’ve said all this before but Dublin is an amazing example of urban sprawl. It’s like some sort of virus and the conurbation is almost as far as Blessington now. As it is, people are commuting from way further south and Tallaght is now many times bigger than Cork City. Patricia had given me directions to her mother’s house via the M50 motorway which I’d written on a slip of paper. I remembered the junction to turn off and then looked for the paper - nowhere. But driving along it somehow came to me and I managed to negotiate through the maze of roads, construction and traffic. Eventually I was lost and stopped to ask directions but with everything changing, how does anyone know where they are from one day to the next? I reversed out of a street into the front of a car parked patiently behind me waiting for me to get my directions. It turned out he was a taxi driver. I’d busted his headlight but he knew the address I was looking for. He called me later with the cost of the new headlight. He fitted it himself so it was cheap too. We left Steve with his mother and drove into Dublin, parking up in time for Tom to make his rendezvous with his sisters.

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reports on other Aisling trips