Woman who was homeless in Kildare says a stranger’s kindness saved her life

By Gráinne Ní Aodha, PA

A woman who was homeless in Kildare for years says the kindness of a shop owner she did not know saved her life.

Antoinette Foley, who is recovering from addiction to heroin and crack cocaine, has urged people not to make assumptions about people who are sleeping rough.

She was sleeping in a tent in a car park near the River Barrow in 2021 when she asked a nearby shop owner, James Mahon, if he had any spare change.

He reached into his pocket, gave her a fiver and she thanked him.

A few days later he came to her tent to ask if she would take part in a photography exhibition he was doing, sparking a friendship that would culminate in Ms Foley being housed and recovering from addiction.

Mr Mahon, an amateur photographer, now has an exhibition of photos taken of Ms Foley in the Art House gallery in Athy. He also released a book this year about Ms Foley’s story called The Hawk Against The Dove: Addiction In Small-Town Ireland.

Ms Foley said she is telling her story for her own children’s sake, and in order to help inform others about the dangers of drugs.

A settled Traveller, she said she got into drugs after a boyfriend gave her heroin, when she did not know what it was, to help ease a toothache.

She said it was hard for her to trust Mr Mahon at first and he tried to help her several times.

“She had been used and abused over the years so she was wondering ‘what’s he after?'” Mr Mahon said.

“We used the photography, really, as a way of communicating and of building up that friendship.”

Ms Foley said: “I was like death alive basically, a lost soul.

“People just looked at a girl sitting with a cup, they just looked at a tent. They didn’t know what was going on, they didn’t know the story.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t look down on anyone unless you’re giving them your hand to help them up.”

She added: “There was photos there that James didn’t want to take, and I begged him to take them because I wanted youngsters to see what can happen to them.”

Mr Mahon said she reduced her heroin use substantially by December 2023 with the help of daily visits to a methadone clinic, before going completely clean.

Mr Mahon said drug addiction in a small town is harder to hide than in a city, and Ms Foley used to beg outside the local Aldi with a torn coffee cup on a daily basis.

“This story played out so much in public, the tent was right opposite the parish church, right beside the secondary school, beside a car park where the parents would come and collect the children, so that anybody could see it,” he said.

“She came here and she was in Athy with three hooks on her back that people could hang their prejudice and their preconceived ideas: she was living rough, she was suffering from substance abuse addiction, and she was a Traveller.

“When this project started, it wouldn’t have been the most popular, I was nearly seen to be encouraging her.

“It was covered over a four-year period. In the first couple of years of that, I could see things were improving and you could sense that it was improving. From the outside, the behaviour was the same.”

Asked whether many shop owners would have had his reaction to someone sleeping rough near his shop, he said: “You can’t stand back and look at something unfolding without being touched by it. There’s a human being there.”

He said she came into the shop for a cup of tea and to talk, and it served as a “refuge” and a “safe space” for her.

“It was great to be able to offer that,” he said.

“Sometimes you’ve got to go beyond having those thoughts of pity and you’ve got to do something concrete, you’ve got to go and hold out a hand of friendship and say ‘come on’.”

Ms Foley said: “I look at James like a second father,” adding that her life is “a million times better now”.

She added: “There was mornings I woke up in that tent and I could pull the ice off from the inside of it like tiles. James used to fill my flask with boiling water in his shop so I could make tea in the tent. I would have been dead only for this man.

“This man woke at five o’clock every morning to bring me in hot water bottles.

“There was times he should have walked away from me, and from that day he handed me that fiver until now, no-one will ever get between us, because I looked at him like a father, and he always treated me like a daughter.”