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

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Under any circumstances, Katriona is someone to look up to and admire for her intellectual prowess, academic achievements and her work in ensuring equal access to education for young Irish girls, but when you read about the absolute dire poverty in which she grew up, she is all the more remarkable. We love a rags-to-riches story, and we love to see someone triumph through sheer determination. But the story is rarely that simple. My story isn't, anyway.' It’s like I lived two lives,” she says. “A life up to the point where my mind was opened by education. Prior to that, I had no idea that you could be anything different.” 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. “What I’ve done is miraculous, and rare, because we don’t have investment. If I was in that situation now, I wouldn’t be here.” Because I’ve been empowered, I have been able to change my life, my children’s lives. I’m not costly any more to the state At the end of the book she makes a challenging assertion. That the likes of the Trinity Access Programme is only aimed at the super-brainy of the poorer classes, like that author herself. (She didn't make those claims about herself. They're mine). The people who are only middle of the road good, AND poor, there's a shoulder shrug. Middle of the road good from middle class families will thrive and survive, but in the TAP they only push the boat out for the super-dupers. Now an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education, Poor stands as a stirring argument for the importance of looking out for our kids' futures. Of giving them hope, practical support and meaningful opportunities.

Hands down one of the best books about difficulties of being brought up in poverty & by parents with addictions. In a simplified manner, book covers such topics as co-dependency, co-addiction and the enormous societal pressure that people from "lower class" experience and how difficult it is to escape it. I read poor in one sitting ... I found it so complelling. An amazing story ... moving, uplifting, brave, heroic ' - Nuala McGovern, Woman's Hour, BBC One of the best [books] I have read about the complexities of poverty . . . one of the most remarkable people you will ever meet' Guardian Before she returned to education and became an award-winning lecturer, Katriona O’Sullivan was a cleaner at Connolly Station in Dublin.

Clearly, O’Sullivan didn’t want a world where she would be the only one that found solid ground. We see this in her efforts to place her experience within her parents’ experiences and her parents’ experiences within their histories. O’Sullivan expertly gives us an insight into the genuine harm of her parents’ addictions but by no means defines them by it. She beautifully and lovingly tells the story of two whole people. Two people who struggled and fought, who lived a life shrouded in pain and poverty, but also in song, loyalty and books. There were glimpses of other lives. At three, she remembers her friend next door being given a hug by her mum, and wondering why her own mother didn’t hug her like that. For a short time, she and her siblings were taken into care, where she “got food, and washed”. She always believed she deserved more, but over the years, she says, “hope and belief get eroded”. The effort of survival was exhausting. “As a kid, I was hopeful, vivacious. All kids are – some are quiet, some are loud, but we all have potential. And then as a teenager, with all the shit constantly, in the end, you just lean into it.” There were people, she says, “trying to keep me hopeful, but it’s very hard to battle against a lifetime of poverty and belief within a family. Eventually, it’s like your light goes out.” For most of my life I felt like I was at the bottom of a trench. The shame of poverty made me feel like I was wading through deep water alone., but the crucial thing I have learned while writing my story is that in tough times I was being carried. I didn't climb out the trench myself. I was pulled out. Of course I worked hard but without the network of community groups and government schemes, the funding, the trinity access programme, the support offered from colleagues and the state and friends there is not a chance I would have made it af all"

Amazing read by an amazing woman. Some parts were absolutely gut-wrenching; really brought a tear to my eye. The fortitude she had to get through what she did amazed me, and to get to where she is today even more so. However, as Katriona herself points out, she didn't make it out alone, there were numerous people along the way who helped her up, as well as programmes and social investment schemes that paved the way. Now all those schemes are gone at a time when we need them more than ever. There must be so many like her out there, struggling with abuse, addiction, terrible parents, with no-one to see them as they really are. This is a harrowing tale of Katriona’s life as she was brought up by drug-addict parents surrounded by poverty. Her world around her was soiled, filthy and squalid. Having somebody like me in there was just pivotal”, she explains. “If you don’t see people like you, you’re never going to aspire to it”. Katriona speaks about the people in education and social care setting who helped her, and those who failed her. I cried when reading about her early childhood and the abuse she suffered. I cried when I read about her older brother coming home from work to find her and her siblings, hungry, with not a parent to be seen. Some chapters are truly harrowing. I found myself with a pain in my chest and thinking of that little seven year old and her brothers and sister long after I'd finished reading. Addiction, too, is seen as a personal failing rather than a complex issue. “There’s nobody I know who is addicted to drugs who planned that,” says O’Sullivan. “Especially for women with addiction, we do not provide enough support and services. My mother was judged so harshly, more than my dad, for being an addict. We need to look at how we moralise around addiction, and poverty.”Full of insight into a live lived right up against the boundaries placed on it by poverty ... so important ... we'd highly recommend' - Fi Glover, Times Radio

It takes a special person to see beyond the wrongs that one has endured and then use one’s wounds as the basis to create something big. As you follow the story beyond O’Sullivan’s early years, she keeps doing big things: overcoming big hurdles and traumas, achieving huge dreams, and creating changes and challenges to the status quo. I think O’Sullivan would have made it anyway, but you can’t ignore the moments along the way that helped.An important contribution to our understanding of poverty and its impact' - Sinéad Gibney, Business Post Most of the time being poor felt like a sodden blanket which was lying heavy across my shoulders dragging me down into dark waters" Her relationship with addict parents Tony and Tilly is gut-wrenching and yet, because of O’Sullivan’s empathy and love for her parents, my judgment and disdain that I had for them at the beginning of the book falters. There’s no doubt of their negligent, harmful actions. But you are also given an understanding of the turmoil that Tony and Tilly lived through.