 I think like most people think you become homeless through just like having a bad family like your family on drugs or anything like that which was not the case for me at all which made me take a long time to actually realize I was homeless. We lost our house and we had nowhere to go. There was no other support there actually for us. It came to just us like staying in friends' houses for a while. Eventually people got really annoyed of just like us imposing on their house. Then eventually someone said to my mum you know you can go to a shelter like and my mum didn't know anything about this and I was too young. I didn't hear this at the time. I was only 10 at the time. Even when it was really the rough night like staying in a car or like literally sitting around on the streets I still didn't dawn on me. I was actually homeless. I just thought it was normal like and I was just with my mum. I just thought I was just always hanging out with my mum. I didn't see anything wrong with it or anything different about it. When we went to the shelter it was just full of kids like you wouldn't even think of it like I just always thought homelessness was just full of people on drugs and people that are alcoholics but now this was like families stuffed into like rooms with a wonderful bed in it with like four kids. To me this was a hotel that we stayed in. This was the B&B we lived in and that was just normal. I was in primary school at the time. I would have been about fifth class and we were doing the shoebox for the homeless and at the time I was really excited about it. My mum didn't even see it as an issue. She was like excited for me. I was like oh mom I'm finding out all about the homeless, the poor homeless kids. They have no house. They have nothing at all and I was like mom I want to get some of my old toys and put it in the shoebox for the homeless kids. So I went to my nanist and I put the shoebox together and like so excited to give these kids and like wrote my little note of like you know I mean here's some of my toys I hope you enjoyed them type of thing and then it was coming up to Christmas and there was like in the B&B the place that the homeless shelter I lived in that I thought was just a hotel. This fella dressed like a Santa Claus came in and I was so excited like I was only 10 like I still believe in Santa and he gave out all these boxes to everyone and when I was opening the boxes and actually looking around at everyone's shoeboxes I had to realise like these are the homeless shoeboxes that I had sent off to other kids that I felt sorry for that I was empathising with when I actually was that child and it was just so hard for me to realise that that was me and that was definitely the moment when I realised that oh like I'm homeless like I'm one of them kids that everyone is like feeling sorry for on skill and like that was me. I think it's so important to donate to charities and on the homeless issues because like my life has completely changed from being that scared little girl in the homeless shelter since then we've just come so far and like honestly my mom is like my main cheerleader like anything I do she is just so impressed by. I got one of the highest results in skill in my points in my leaving cert. I got into DCU, I'm now in final year doing journalism degree. Donating to charities is so important because it helps people like me to get to where I am now and like now I can actually live a normal life because of them charities. I'm absolutely delighted to announce that all donations for the 24 hour broadcast will be going towards the Peter McFerry Trust.