In the Court of Criminal Appeal on Monday, a priest had his seven-and-a-half year sentence for sexually abusing two young boys reduced to 18 months. On the same day, in the same court, a young woman heroin addict who stole a tourist's handbag had her nine-year sentence reduced to six years.

The picture of 20-year old Sabrina Walsh being escorted from court, which accompanied the court report in Tuesday morning's Irish Times, is one of a young woman in stunned disbelief. Her dark hair is cut in a short boyish cut, her eyes look vacant.

"That's not the Sabrina I knew," remarks Marie Mahony, one of Walsh's former neighbours in Coultry Drive, just off Coultry Road in Dublin's Ballymun. The middle-aged mother is holding a copy of the newspaper before her, standing in her kitchen at number 57. "To see her, she might as well be dead. That's not the child I knew.

"She had beautiful long curly hair down past her waist," she smiles, looking up from the photograph. "Ah, it's sad to see her. It's awful what happened to her. She shouldn't have got that at all. It's treatment that she should have been given. She'll only end up worse in Mountjoy."

On June 30th, Walsh pleaded guilty to stealing a handbag in Cafe En Seine on Dublin's Dawson Street in December 1997. Despite pleas by her barrister, Raymond Farrell, in court on Monday that Walsh could not have known the bag contained £10,000 cash and jewellery, Mr Justice O'Flaherty said bag-snatching was like a "cancer" in society and that by the severity of the sentence the court was sending out a "loud and clear" example.

"How can they do that to someone?" asked Walsh's eldest brother, Danny. "How can they just decide that they are going to make some kind of an example of someone? Destroyed her life is what they've done. And my ma's. She took a nervous breakdown in June, and she's just in bits now."

Walsh's mother, Nellie, moved with her husband Christie, or "Royco" as he is known, from a small cottage in the centre of Dublin to a three-bedroom Corporation house in Ballymun in about 1976, just before Walsh was born.

Coultry Drive is a small crescent of houses. The paintwork on most is peeling, and Tesco supermarket bags are strewn around the entrance to several. The houses look at each other over a small patch of muddied green.

Before they moved, the youngest of the couple's five children were twins. Days before the two boys were to make their Holy Communion, one was knocked down and killed by an articulated truck. The tragedy, says Marie, was one of the reasons for the family's move.

"Nellie used to say, when she was trying to get Sabrina treatment for the drugs, `God has already taken one. Is he going to take another?' "

Five year-old Sabrina used to "pal around with" Marie's daughter, Louise. The pair probably walked together most mornings across the grassy patch in front of the houses of Coultry Drive, past the six tower blocks of flats on Coultry Road, to the Virgin Mary national school on Shangan Road. They may have been accompanied by one of her brothers, Matthew, Jason or Danny or by her sister, Helen.

Sabrina and Louise continued on to Ballymun Comprehensive, and though Louise did her Leaving Certificate, Sabrina left when she was 15. Marie says it was her ambition to become a nanny.

"Nellie always had great time for kids and Sabrina was never away from her mam. She was as happy as Larry when you'd let her look after the little ones for a bit. She used to go off with my daughter with the buggy, you'd send them to the shops and they'd be off for two hours."

Neither Danny nor any of the neighbours could tell how Walsh first got involved in drugs, though most agreed that she started some time after her 15th birthday. She began experimenting with tablets containing morphine and moved rapidly on to trying heroin, though according to Marie, "she only got bad in the last year".

Nellie got her daughter into a treatment centre in Kildare sometime after she turned 16 and it was there that she met a man, quite a bit older than her, with whom she travelled to London.

They spent over a year there, said Danny, living and committing petty crime together to feed their heroin habits. Nellie went to London to bring her youngest child back to live with the family in Ballymun. It was in the past year when she got to the stage that, in the words of Danny, "she'd sell almost anything to get a fix."

Nellie bought her a jacket for Christmas in 1996 which she sold within two days.

When she returned to live in Coultry Drive two years ago, the family say they would have to watch her constantly, for fear she might start a fire with her cigarettes when she was stoned.

"I saw her there a few months ago," remembers Marie, "walking through the shopping centre, and I said `Hello' to her, but sure she didn't even recognise me. She was just walking along, with her eyes closed like, really out of it. And her hair was in bits, and her teeth . . ."

Nellie and Christopher Walsh surrendered their house in Ballymun about a year ago, in exchange for a modern, comfortable apartment in town. Marie says she hardly sees Nellie anymore, though they speak on the phone.

"Ah, Sabrina's mother, God she tried to do everything for her, doted on her. Sabrina was her baby. She got her into a detox in Beaumont Hospital, and the child was about to start another six-week programme in Cherry Orchard."

"She really wants to come off the drugs, is always talking about it," says Danny.

Walsh, he says, had six convictions for petty larceny before her nine-year sentence in June.

"None of them guards or courts ever did anything to get her some treatment. She's devastated now, very saddened. She thought she was going to get off," he continues, speaking on Wednesday evening. "I'm just after watching that guard getting off for killing a young fella. And that priest. But no one will fight for us. We couldn't get a big, expensive legal team."

Sabrina Walsh's case will be reviewed in 2000.