BEING THERE:Once given up as a lost cause - even by himself - Gary has found the courage to confront his chronic heroin addiction and, with the help of dedicated teams of social workers, is now on the road to recovery, writes  RÓISÍN INGLE.

IT STILL BOTHERS Gary that he doesn't remember the name of the surgeon who saved his right leg. Six years ago, when he contracted Staphylococcus aureus - the SA in MRSA - through injecting heroin into his groin, his knee turned red, then purple, then black and swelled to the size of a football. After the first operation the surgeon told him that it was the worst active infection he had ever dealt with.

"It was so bad I was signing forms to have my leg amputated from the hip," he says. "There would have been no stump left for a prosthesis. But I had a surgeon, a Northern Ireland fella, who said 'this guy is only 31, we are not removing his leg unless we absolutely have to' and he did another operation which saved it. I wish I could remember his name."

Directly after the operation, Gary was back using heroin and injecting into his groin. "It didn't matter that I'd nearly lost my leg, my only logic back then was 'how do I get that drug into me?'" he says.

After hearing this story and all his other horrific stories, there's something momentous about just sitting here, drinking milky hot chocolate and chatting about Kanye West, in Gary's one bedroom flat in Dublin's north inner-city. He secured the accommodation with the help of staff at StepDown, a six-month residential programme designed to equip former addicts with the skills for independent living.

Thanks to the programme and his own hard work, after almost 20 years of drugs and crime and self-harm and failed attempts at recovery, the now-37-year-old has achieved a level of stability that even two years ago nobody close to him could have imagined was possible. The lines on his face tell their own story.

RE-ENTERING THE real world after his last round of treatment - he's been through most treatment centres in Dublin and beyond, several of them twice - was a surreal experience he needed intensive support to get through.

"It was shattering, like being dropped out of a spaceship or off another planet and landing on earth," he says. "I used to walk down the street making imaginary phone calls and texts just so I didn't have to make eye contact with anyone. Because in your head everybody is looking at you, everybody knows your history and everybody can see what underwear you have on. You are clean but you are on another planet and all you can think is, 'what now?'"

For Gary the answer to "what now" was Step-Down. He says the inter-agency initiative run by homeless organisation Focus Ireland, drug treatment project Keltoi and the Rehabilitation Integration Service provided a "safe space" where he could learn how to live again. The programme started three years ago and the results of its first evaluation report indicate that even at this early stage it has been a success.

While some relapsed during the programme, the 12 former clients and the seven going through Step-Down at the moment are understood to be drug-free. Most ex-clients are living independently or back with their families, and all of them are either in education or training, while two are travelling around Australia.

Gary himself is just about to complete his certificate in addiction studies and will start the diploma course in September. He is employed by Ringsend District Response to Drugs, a community employment scheme in Dublin, where he works helping other addicts. He says he wouldn't have been an "eminently likeable chap" when he got out of treatment the last time. His attitude was "yeah, I need help but I don't particularly like you even though you are helping me. I still had that old arrogance but I am more relaxed now . . . I badly needed a safe place, just a roof over my head with support, not over-the-top support. I didn't want to be mammied and they respected that. It was a life-changing time for me."

He says he is now "a million miles away" from where he thought he'd ever be. Growing up - he had a comfortable childhood on Dublin's northside - Gary was the kind of boy who made people earn their babysitting money. A gifted soccer player and hurler, his talent meant he was given plenty of opportunities but he always had what he describes as a sense of "disconnection", of "not fitting in" and of "not being good enough".

REBELLIOUS AT school and difficult at home, he started drinking and smoking hash from the age of 12. Early on, he says, he made a connection between alcohol and coping with life. "It was like everyone else had been given this special gift bag, a way of dealing with things, but I missed it and when I started drinking it was like 'this is what I need'. There would have been a lot of bullying in my life growing up and with drink I could fight back and I was no longer this scared little boy. I was a more boisterous person but as I got older I didn't like what I had become."

There were years of anti-social behaviour. He caused trouble, got into fights, set things on fire and was constantly being brought home by gardaí. By 19 he had tried heroin. "Pretty soon it became my drug of choice. It dealt with everything I needed," he says.

He was working, driving a van for a food company, but one day had a "drug-induced brainwave" which led to him leaving the job in order to move to Ballymun for a full-time drug-taking career. His life became a cycle of using, being arrested and getting charged, with bouts on methadone programmes and treatment centres in between.

Intelligent and relentlessly self-aware, Gary came up with a way of dealing with the chaotic life he had created. "My whole life there had been huge expectations of me. My father was extremely hardworking and because of the opportunities I'd been given I was expected to achieve, but I always either sabotaged myself or fell short of the expectations," he says.

"When things were at their worst, I hit on the ingenious plan that if I lowered my expectations of my own personal standards then I could make it okay for me to live the life I was living."

The plan worked. Most of the time. But sometimes feelings of "I am worth so much more than this" would sneak up on him, a nagging suspicion that this was not the life he was supposed to be leading. "Those were the times when I tried to kill myself, when I had the awareness that my life was such a mess. It destroyed my parents, my father in particular, because I think when a son goes wrong a father feels like a failure. So during the times when I was aware of how badly things had gone I wanted to cut my own throat out," he says.

In a life littered with wake-up calls, one occasion stands out from the rest. Gary was living in a bedsit in Swords, had a bit of money and enough drugs for a couple of days. Strung out on his regular cocktail of tablets and heroin, he was overcome by suicidal thoughts. "I just wanted to end it all but this was one of those times when something you've learned over all the treatment and counselling and times in rehab comes to the surface. So instead of doing what I wanted to do, I rang Keltoi and I was checked into the Mater and then brought into St Ita's in Portrane which is an experience I will never forget," he says.

He says in terms of rock bottoms this episode was "down there with the worst of them" and proved to be a turning point. "For years I thought a mental institution was exactly where I should be," he explains. "I thought I needed to be heavily medicated, out of the loop of life. I didn't want to feel anything, feelings were pain because I could not deal with them. Back then I either loved you or I wanted to kill you, that was the widest gamut of my emotions."

So he thought he belonged somewhere like St Ita's. "But I quickly realised I didn't belong there. A voice inside me said this isn't for you. I knew I wasn't really the person who I had become." He was taken back into Keltoi for a second time and, when that treatment period came to an end, he was deemed a suitable candidate for one of the seven places on the Step-Down programme.

It's an intense regime which combines a day programme in centres such as Coolmine or Merchant Quay's Soilse with group work, one-on-one counselling and life skills courses in the Focus Ireland residential centre, George's Hill. Securing accommodation is the biggest challenge faced by staff, according to the evaluation report, but Gary was given keys to his flat, one of Focus Ireland's permanent housing supply, the day he left Step-Down.

THERE ARE still challenges. He hurt a lot of people, friends and family, over the years. "Yes I burnt a lot of bridges but I also found some were not beyond repair," is how he puts it. "My life was what it was. I have regrets and yes I'm sorry for a lot of the things I have done but I am not sorry for who I am and all those experiences are what made me who I am."

He's also under no illusions about the work he has to do, like addressing the lingering residue of "the anger and the arrogance. People would still say to me I have a look about me that might make you a bit wary, so yeah I probably still have a bit of that façade going on," he says. "I get up every morning and I am a cranky bastard but after a couple of fags and a bit of breakfast and a shower, life is magic. I can't wait until a quarter to nine to go to work. I come home, do normal person's stuff, spend time with my girlfriend. I've football three times a week and two evenings of aftercare. I've chosen my profession, I'm eminently employable, I have a lot to offer and a whole world has opened up."

He clears away the hot chocolate cups, gives me a lift back to work and says these days when he drives past men or women living the life he used to, he leaves them with a wish. "It's a mental wish that says, 'Jesus, I hope you find your way out of it.' It's no bloody life, it's heartbreaking."

He waves goodbye and it strikes you then that against all the odds, this angry, out of control addict has become what he might call an eminently likeable chap.