Jimmy Bell coming to terms with the past and moving on

Expelled from school, thrown out of his beloved football club, at 14 year Jimmy Bell started taking E tablets and soon graduated to heroin, going nowhere the future looked bleak until his passion for sport and desire for something better spurred him on, Jennifer May reports

Since it’s inception in 2003, Big Issues Street Soccer League has seen many of the young men who have taken part make remarkable strides, not only on the football pitch or representing their country with such dignity all over the world, but in their personal lives also.  These achievements deserve recognition and serve to remind us why participation in sport such as the street league plays such an important role in providing young lads who have experienced difficulties not only a goal, but a sense of belonging, self respect and a renewed sense of their own worth.
One such success story is Jimmy Bell who represented Ireland so ably in both the European championship and the Homeless World Cup last year, earning himself not only the respect of his trainers and team-mates, but the admiration of audiences in both Poland and Melbourne, where he won Player of the Tournament and the Fair Play Award in each competition respectively. Jimmy has had a long battle to get to where he is today proving that he is a person of courage and tenacity, and has worked incredibly hard to achieve all that he has. 
Hailing from Ballymun, Jimmy was the youngest of five children (he has four sisters) and came from a stable family background. Always mischievous, with a tendency to act the clown, Jimmy started getting into trouble at school in his early teens. ‘I was viewed as a trouble-maker from the beginning’ Jimmy, a bright, articulate man, who is more than happy to share his story, remembers. ‘I was never given any time by the teachers.  At the age of 14 I was expelled.’  He also found himself thrown out of his beloved football club shortly afterwards (the Tolka Rovers, where he had been a promising young player), which for someone so passionate about football, only compounded his sense of failure.
On the streets all day long at such an early age, he was bound to get into trouble and hanging around with an older gang, Jimmy discovered drugs when he was still very young.  ‘I tried my first ‘E’ (Ecstasy) within three months of being expelled from school and within two weeks of that, I had taken heroin. We used to go to parties and you’d take ‘E’ and the thing to do – it was all the rage back then – was to take heroin to come down’.
Within a couple of months of first trying heroin Jimmy knew he was addicted and began committing petty crimes to fund his habit. ‘I’d go into town and shop-lift,’ he recalls. ‘I’d steal from the big shops and then take the stuff back to Ballymun and sell it.  I convinced myself I was like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor; that was my way of dealing with the guilt.’
By now in trouble with the law, Jimmy’s parents, who had no experience of addiction and therefore no idea what their only son had been up to, were told by a concerned friend of their son’s problem.  They were devastated and his mother did her best to get him into treatment.  As he was still so young the courts were also anxious not to send him on the recidivist road of repeat offending (‘I think they thought I was young enough to be saved’, he laughs) so sent him into a residential rehab programme based in Beaumont Hospital. The first day he was released, he used heroin again.  
He was then sent to the Coolmine Therapeutic Community, but left after only two months.  He did not use heroin for the following two years, but alcohol became his drug of choice and this caused as much grief for his loved ones as heroin use had: ‘I had a job, and was drinking at weekends, but pretty soon my weekends were starting earlier and earlier in the week.  I was a devious drug addict but drink made me stupid and I was constantly getting into trouble for fighting.  It was just swapping one addiction for another as I hadn’t really come to terms with my problems at that stage.’ he admits.
Inevitably Jimmy again turned to heroin and it was only in 2003 when he went back to Coolmine, that he was finally ready to face his demons and really battle his addiction: ‘You have to want to do it for yourself,’ he reiterates. ‘There is no use trying to do it for other people – you have to be ready.’ This time he stayed and completed the full two and a half years residential programme.  He has been drug and alcohol free since he graduated.
When Coolmine began bringing their clients to participate in the league on Saturdays, Jimmy got involved and he immediately discovered he had not lost his talent, or passion, for the game. 
‘I loved it,’ he says enthusiastically. ‘I found what I had been missing from my life.  I lost weight, got healthy, trained hard -it really helped me feel accepted back into society.  Once I lived for the weekends for drink or drugs, now I live for the weekends: for football.’
Jimmy credits the league with playing a big part in his recovery, giving him that all important goal to work towards, a sense of direction and a new sense of self confidence that grew with his achievements on the pitch, the culmination of which was his selection onto the team to play in the World Cup in Melbourne last summer.
‘Being at the World Cup was brilliant – no drug could ever come close to the buzz of that’ Jimmy enthuses. ‘To see a crowd of 5000 people all singing you name and cheering you on was amazing’ (The crowd knew Jimmy from player profiles where he had been named as a player to watch after his remarkable performance at the European Championship earlier that year).
 Because of his dedication, talent and commitment Jimmy has now been selected by Street League organizers to train as a coach, so he will be working alongside FAI coach Mick Pender with the new team that will be representing Ireland at the World Cup in Milan later this year, and he is delighted to have this opportunity.
‘I wanted to continue working in youth work and outreach services so this is a great chance for me’ he says. ‘To represent your country in anything is a great honour, to represent it as a coach is an even greater one: if we can go to Milan this year and win, that would be the greatest achievement of all.’
Jimmy is now happily settled down and with a five-month-old daughter Tori, of whom he is inordinately proud and is very positive about his future. He says that he ‘makes amends for his past’ every day, through encouraging other young people from his area to follow his lead and leave heroin behind. ‘If telling my story can help anyone to get clean, I am really glad to do so,’ he explains.  ‘I don’t think I would have got here without the help of Sean Kavanagh’ (Big Issues editor and Street League founder), ‘who has done so much to help me and always looks out for all the lads and Dan Carey our manager from last year.  I also owe a debt to all those at Coolmine who helped me grow up – without them I wouldn’t be here today.’

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