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A young homeless couple who ended up sleeping in a derelict hospital building have spoken of their agony at losing their unborn baby.

Ciara O’Shaughnessy and Colin Bale were put out of their home of eight months after it was robbed and ransacked and the landlord suddenly put it up for sale.

They stayed with family and friends for a while but then the couple from Donabate, Dublin, ended up sleeping in their car and then an abandoned psychiatric hospital.

“It was like you were put in a black box and just left there to rot away,” said Colin.

But unknown to the couple Ciara was pregnant and was rushed to hospital with complications.

“It was last April, the week of my birthday. I did not even know I was pregnant but I was taken into hospital with cramps in my stomach,” said Ciara.

“I did not know what was going on but they brought me in and were ringing Colin.

“Within a couple of hours they told him it was life-threatening and he better get up here. I found out I was after losing the baby.”

Colin said: “We planned it for two years so it was a killer, an absolute killer. It was gut-wrenching, like being punched in the stomach.

“The only thing I would say is that because of each other we got through it - because we had each other’s shoulder to cry on and talk.”

Ciara said: “The depression sunk in pretty bad with me. Colin was the motivator. He motivated me and got me up. ‘Come on, snap out of it, we have to get out of this situation otherwise we are just going to be left there’.

“So I had to go with his way of thinking. If it was not for him I would probably still be in there [the derelict building.]”

The couple, who are now in emergency accommodation, were talking on a hard-hitting new RTE documentary series, Generation F’d, which looks at young twentysomethings who are paying the price of the 2008 crash.

Over three episodes it looks at the shattered futures of many young people who simply cannot get a loan to buy a home and who are terrified of rocketing rent increases.

The series reveals that in 2012 there were 11,000 vacant properties to rent in Ireland, a figure which has now plummeted to 3,520.

“People are not living but surviving, going from crisis to crisis,” claims one commentator.

Economist Stephen Kinsella said that people still had the same ambitions of marriage, home and family but “this generation can’t access credit to do that.”

“We have an intolerable moral situation in Ireland where people, who have always done the right thing, are being left out in the cold, because of the fallout from Ireland’s economic crisis.”

Traditionally, children become more successful and well-off than their parents but, despite being better educated and better travelled, this generations is predicted to be worse off than their parents for the first time ever.

The idea of a pensionable job for life is now history and today’s young people can expect to have four to eight careers, the show claims.

Suicide and self-harm rates are 57 per cent higher than the pre-recession years and despite an improved economy 35,000 young people emigrated last year alone, three times the pre-recession levels.

Generation F’d claims: “This is a generation with its back against the wall. Simple ambitions like having a full time job, owning a home and starting a family are impossible dreams.”

The official homeless figure in the country is 6,525 and rising.

Meanwhile Colin and Ciara are trying to get their lives back on track and she is waiting to see if she has got a care assistant’s job with the elderly.

“My da always says we have lived a lot in a short space of time, the amount of things that have happened to us,” says Colin.

The couple showed the filmmakers the spot where they parked their car in woodland after becoming homeless.

“We barely said two words to each other the whole night because we were kind of amazed this was after happening to us,” said Ciara.

“It was like, ‘Oh, my God, look where we are staying! How the hell did it come to this?’

“And then we found that abandoned building and ended up just staying there. We had to. We had not got anything else.”

The first episode of Generation F’d can be seen on RTE One, Thursday January 19 at 10.30pm.