Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief

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I’m a bit bemused that the authors focus is not focused on the care system failing to remove the children when addiction is clearly a spiralling problem exposing children to neglect and risky people in their house, instead Katriona is more concerned on the education system, which can help and should, but they can’t replace good parenting in a stable home with parents that feed their kids when not in school and fills them with more esteem and encourage them to learn (going to parents evening and ensuring kids go to school). There’s a uniform of the middle classes,” she says, and she was wrestling with it (a colleague had even suggested she dress more like them).

Books UK Poor - Penguin Books UK

With unflinching honesty and humour, Katriona tells us how she managed to break free from the cycle of poverty that was her legacy. Risk is a situational concern, and until one understands the context of a person’s situation, one cannot judge the risk inherent in that person’s day-to-day existence.Two years before I started my degree I had been working as the dinner lady in the Institute of Education. There were school leavers too – young people from deprived or DEIS schools who were challenged by the education system but showed potential. Kids don’t want to play with you, so it’s horrible because not only are you suffering at home, I was also going to school and being on the outside.

From homeless and expecting at 15 to a lecturer at Trinity

Home could be a frightening place, where drugs were dealt, and “friends” of their parents were often sprawled on the floor. When choice, free will and safety are absent, there is a risk attached to every decision that is made. He had gone to Ireland with her mother after skipping bail following another arrest, and he arrived one day to take her son back there with him. Everyone should read this book… it explains the deep life-long effects poverty and social injustice have on a person, in a way that only someone who has been subjected to it can.

One take-home point from that for me was that children in poverty need more than just 'hard work' to make their way out into a better life. It brings to the forefront the struggles faced by those suffering from poverty and the services that are just not available to those in need anymore. The results will be posted online in June, if you guys are thinking about using this degree for anything decent in the future a 2.

Katriona O’Sullivan: What will you do to change Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan: What will you do to change

She is furious at the rhetoric around poverty – during the past decade especially – that if someone is poor, it is their own moral failing, and if only they worked harder, they could drag themselves out of it. As I stand in front of Mary Robinson, one of the few Irish presidents I actually know of and admire, it finally feels like I belong. She’s closer to her father than her mother, perhaps subconsciously she thinks if Tilly had been a better mum and rejected her father to raise them better things might have been better all round, ironic when both were encouraging drinking and drugs as their norm, even Katriona a bad influence on her mum when John was small. How much courage, strength, fortitude and pure determination must it have taken to get where she is today?It is astounding to contemplate how Katriona managed to survive the life she was given, and through her own endeavours and with the assistance of a robust support system (which she had to navigate as well), emerged as a highly accomplished and compassionate academic. It also gives painful insight into the far reaching, all encompassing damage that undiagnosed mental health and consequent addiction can cause.