`Would you be interested," an angry anonymous voice on the phone said, "in writing about a young woman who has vindicated the right to life of the unborn no less than five times?
"She has a lot of problems, Winnie has. She's homeless, and she sniffs glue and paint. And what happens is that when she gets pregnant they take her into a psychiatric hospital, and she has the baby and gives it up. And then they put her out again. She's back on the streets."
That couldn't be, I said. They wouldn't do that to a dog. Who is this woman?
The man on the phone said that I would have heard of her - that she was in the newspaper before. "Remember the traveller woman who was living in a shed near Waterford when she was seven months pregnant? That's her. Nothing has changed for her. That's Winnie."
Winnie's life can be tracked through a world that lies just below the surface of official Ireland - a world of hostels with peephole doors, and the cigarette-scarred hallways of police stations, and pointedly cheerful drop-in centres, and food eaten hurriedly at Formica tables by bowed figures in their overcoats whose total belongings are in the carrier bags at their feet.
Sometimes she lives in a world below that again. She moves around the shadowy bits of cities - abandoned yardways behind corrugated-iron doors, unlit alleyways, the basements of condemned buildings. She doesn't even have a carrier bag. She has nothing.
I did find her once, a few weeks ago. She was in an institution temporarily, so she was able to talk a bit though her mouth hurt from the solvents. She had a new pair of trainers that they'd given her in the woman's wing of Mountjoy prison, and a warm tracksuit. She must have gone in there near-naked. Left to herself she has no shoes, no underclothes, no protection for her tiny woman's body.
They'd given her a beautiful satin pillow made by other prisoners in craft class. She had been thinking of taking it home, if she'd had a bag, which she did not. What home? "I have a place of my own, lady," she whispered. The place is the shed near Waterford.
The shed is four miles out of town. It is a terribly long trudge along the busy main road past the big garages and the glittering showroom of Waterford Crystal and the beckoning fast-food cafes where a filthy and possibly staggering figure could not expect to be served.
When you climb a gate, out where the city ends and the dark fields begin, and go into her shed - it is a lean-to, rather, with a sodden mattress in a corner - you wonder why she walks eight miles to go out and back to it. There's nothing there.
Mud. Briars. Bottles. The pitiable remains of a fire. Would she not be better off in a doorway in a town?
Why did the St Vincent de Paul give her a torch to help her make her way in the dark to this hovel?
Why did they try to arrange with taxi-drivers that they'd take her out to this?
Why have local gardai - who shift on our behalf the people even the kindest taxidrivers won't have in their cabs - given her lifts in the squad-car to this?
There is nothing here. An animal wouldn't live here.
But she is safe here. She is not safe anywhere else. This was what her whispered talk kept coming back to.
That she is not ever safe. She had a boyfriend. She needs a boyfriend, to protect her on the streets. Her brother says the boyfriend beat her.
"He's called The Pig," says her brother, who sells the Big Issue. "You'd have to be a pig to beat a woman. I heard he's down in Cork. If he ever touches my sister again I'll go there and I'll slit his throat. God or nobody, no religion, comes into this. . ." But maybe The Pig was better than no-one.
There's a place in Dublin Winnie goes to for clothes or a wash.
"She could be with some group of men, drinking, and when they've finished passing her around like snuff at a wake she might turn up here and we'd clean her up." That's what the man who runs the place says. The Pig maybe minded her out on the waste ground.
Anyway, he was hers - her man. "She had a partner," a woman who has helped Winnie said: "He could read the paper. They had a dignity of their own."
But the partnership didn't last. "He's with another woman now," Winnie said to me, "and they have a baby. He said I could come and live with them if I stopped sniffing the paint. But I don't know. . . two women and the one man. There could be trouble." There could. But what's the alternative?
"Could you be pregnant now, maybe?" I asked her.
"No," she said.
"How do you know?"
"I wasn't with anyone," she said.
"But maybe you were and you forget?"
"Yeah," she said. "I might forget alright."
It is the way of life that makes this scrap of humanity - four foot tall, five or six stone in weight, about 30 years old - so vulnerable.
She's not backward or anything like that. She can write. She can make wintry little jokes. She has a strong will. Up in Exchange House behind the church in Meath Street there is a woman called Michelle who sorts things out for her.
Say she wanted to go to Waterford to see her two youngest at Christmas: Michelle would organise to get her there. The train usually won't take her, but if she's left to the bus the bus will.
"She has a mind of her own," Michelle says. "All I do when she comes in is ask her what she wants. There's no point in going down any other road." She has a mind. She has preferences.
She was up in court last month for stealing earphones because somewhere in her world there is or was a Walkman and her two or three Country 'n' Irish tapes. But then again, she is sometimes out of her mind.
She doesn't actually come into Exchange House. She hangs around at the gate, protected against being looked at by layers of coats and hats. The other travellers mostly disown her. If you ask them, "do you know Winnie?" they spit out: "Winnie? What would I know her for?"
Her children are beautiful. Sam, who runs the Hostel for Homeless Men in Waterford keeps her photos for her, carefully locked in a press. There are three or four bent colour photos. A man - the father of the two youngest - in a hospital room grinning toothlessly under his baseball cap into the camera, and a plump red-haired toddler beside him, and Winnie behind him in a clean dressing-gown with the little monkey-faced newborn baby in her arms.
You could hardly call them a family. Winnie told me she fed her babies herself, but presumably they go into foster-care while she still has milk. What does "family" mean to Winnie, anyway? Her brother was reared by the nuns in Dublin and he sees deep into things.
"Sammy and me brought Winnie down to the psychiatric unit where she'd have a nice pillow and wake up in the morning and get her breakfast and look forward to having her dinner.
"And then the mother came over from Birmingham and took her out. The mother was there with a big smiling face and wicked eyes. And I see it in my mind's eye - Winnie was lying back, completely dependent on her. And then after two days the mother hopped on a bus to Rosslare and back to England, and Winnie was left on the street, back at square one.
"All my sister has to look back on is drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and fists. That's how she visualises people," the brother said.
There's every hope for Winnie's children. A few years ago, in Dublin, there was an outcry when a woman who had been drinking on waste ground was found frozen to death in the snow. That woman's daughter is a lovely girl now, who got seven honours in her Junior Cert last year.
But for Winnie herself? I asked her what she hoped for. She doesn't want a caravan because "they" could attack her there. "Even a little cottage, they could get in the windows."
If only she could live in a room surrounded by other rooms with people who'd protect her in them, she whispered, but without conviction. "I had to run from young fellas yesterday," she suddenly flashes. "Only there was a man in the security hut at the Coombe Hospital I was finished." And "If I had a boyfriend who didn't make a fool of me. . .?" she says, tentatively.
She cannot have these things. There is not even an open prison for women. Not that she is a criminal - though she has a long criminal record. But she is not civilised. She is disruptive. There is no sheltered housing, anywhere, for a disruptive woman, though such a person is the most vulnerable, the most in need of shelter, of anyone.
She is not allowed to have a partner. Men go into one hostel when they're homeless: women and children into another. Paddy Gallagher who works in TRUST, a resource for the homeless, says: "When you're homeless you're supposed to be sexless as well." Even the Simon Community in Dublin won't book a man and woman in together.
They know Winnie at Simon. Their shelter is permanently booked out, but they keep one emergency bed for the most needy of all the sleeping rough they meet on their soup run. Winnie sometimes gets that bed.
The grimy little room is completely bare. Someone donated the greyish duvet cover and worn pillow-case on the small bed. You look at it. It's only a bed. But if you are shuddering with exhaustion - if you are afraid to go asleep in a doorway - what must that bed mean?
"She was much heavier six months ago," Michelle at Exchange House says. "She's not able for the streets any more. It's too hard. She's attacked too often."
Michelle doesn't know where Winnie is now. No-one I could find has had contact with her for about three weeks, when I saw her myself. But she's probably alive. It is only a week since Michelle found a Christmas card stuck in the railings outside her office.
"I am around (Dublin)" the card said, and above that, Winnie had drawn a flower. How did she get a biro? How does she know how to draw a flower? When did she creep to the railings to leave this there?
Michelle values that card. There are heartbreakingly good people everywhere who care about Winnie. Kathleen is in charge of the woman's wing of Mountjoy, and does not know that her face softens with affection when she talks about "Curly," as straight-haired Winnie is known. "She comes in in a terrible state," Kathleen says sadly, "with her nose and hands covered in sores and paint."
In Mountjoy Winnie is made clean and comfortable and protected from other inmates who would rob her of her few cigarettes. Alice and Paddy at TRUST can mobilise a network of caring doctors and nurses. She has been helped to rest in hospitals like Newcastle and Ardkeen. The Legion of Mary runs the Regina Coeli hostel which has been one of her addresses. She has friends at Simon in Cork.
In Dublin, Sister Brigid, who dispenses dinners and attention to men and women often as needy as Winnie at The Little Flower Centre, is keeping an eye out for her. Sam, up to his eyes in the overcrowded Homeless Men's Shelter in Waterford, who has often brought her in and locked the door so she could be showered and dressed - he's hoping she'll turn up at Christmas.
No one who knows her is unmoved by her absolute vulnerability, though to passers-by she is - understandably - a revolting sight. Her brother thinks of her constantly. "That person doesn't need pity," he says with dignity. "That person needs care."
It isn't individuals who fail her. It is the system. The system is why the man who tried to help her rang a journalist.
"The psychiatric services say she's a social problem. The social workers say it's a health problem. But the Health Board says it is a local authority problem because she's homeless. But the local authorities won't give her anything because of her condition. When she's pregnant the psychiatric services take her in. She has given birth five times and had the babies taken from her. Why is she having the babies if she's not suitable?"
Why? She was last seen about a week ago. A nightmare glimpse. A man who sleeps in the Simon shelter on Usher's Island says he saw her "running out of a pub, straight into the traffic, with a blanket over her head. She ran down the quays, right in the middle of all the cars. She was under the blanket, running fast."
We can guess that she was running away from something, not towards anything. That's all we know.