From a small start, Ability West has filled a large gap in disability services for 50 years

Imagine being the only person to respond to your own newspaper appeal?

This was the rather dispiriting situation that Seán Keane found himself in during the autumn of 1961, when a letter by him published in The Connacht Tribune was met with silence.

“Would anybody be interested in doing something for mentally handicapped children in Galway?” he had asked, referring to a new association for same which had been recently formed by parents and friends in Dublin.

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Undaunted by the silence that followed, he wrote two months later to the newspaper again, inspiring several enlightened editorials, and initiating a movement that was to have a lasting impact to this day.

“God’s special children”, who were often hidden at home, refused the sacraments and sent to psychiatric institutions – this was the public perception of what was then termed “mental handicap” when parents such as Keane got together a half-century ago.

As Caoilte and Elske Breatnach, authors of a history of one such grouping, record, it took some guts. Such was the stigma that the pioneering founders of the Galway association wondered whether parents would have the courage to come forward.

Changing times
And yet, both note, "the times were a-changing" in the early 1960s , with the first man in space, John F Kennedy in the White House, Martin Luther King leading the African-American civil rights movement, and, at home, Teilifís Éireann, as it was then known, making its first broadcast on New Year's Eve 1961.

Former attorney general Declan Costello – then a Fine Gael TD and author of the party's defining document, Towards a Just Society – was one of the early supporters of the Galway effort, which began with meetings in 1962.

Costello, father of a child with autism, was a founding member of the National Association of Mentally Handicapped in Ireland (NAMHI) which had been established in Dublin in 1961.

Another NAMHI founder, Sean Brosnahan, was general secretary of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation. He contacted Galway branch chairman and secretary Mick Raftery and Micheál MacSweeney, who set up an ad hoc committee of teachers, clergy and doctors, meeting initially in the offices of the Galway Chamber of Commerce.

The aim was to secure educational services for children with special needs and to promote greater understanding of the “right to light” – a phrase used by the Brothers of St John of God in its efforts to correct common misconceptions, such as the notion that children with special needs would “grow out of it” if left alone.

"We had £20 to start off with," Marie O'Sullivan, first secretary of the Galway Association for Mentally Handicapped Children, inaugurated in May 1963, recalled. So fundraising began in earnest, embraced by the city, with bingo nights, beetle drives, suppers, dances, flag days and donation of furniture made by the staff of T Ó hUiginn Teo in Shantalla.

The first temporary premises for what eventually became St Joseph's School comprised two rooms, rented at a cost of three pounds and 10 shillings a week. Landlady was a Miss Crowe who owned a house on Newcastle Road next door to the association's first chairman, Kevin O'Rourke, father of RTÉ broadcaster Seán O'Rourke.

Tuam branch
Three years later, a strong sister branch in Tuam was formed, and further shoots spread out to compass points east and west. A rota of voluntary drivers was organised to bring children from the county into school in town.

The transport was varied, as Della Burke of the Tuam branch recalled. There were vegetable vans and private cars, and she remembered vividly watching one van coming down the road and feeling that it was “like a Black Maria coming to collect her child”.

From 1967, the Department of Education agreed to pay for transport, while the State and Galway County Council also paid towards the school's running costs.

Fast forward 50 years, and the association – now known as Ability West – is a firmly established provider, along with the Brothers of Charity, for both children and adults with special needs, with core funding of more than €23 million and services ranging from training and respite centres to community support across the county, from Tigh Nan Dooley in Connemara to centres in Glenamaddy, Portumna and Ballinasloe.

In their history, the Breatnachs profile the many staff and volunteers and parents who contributed to that growth. “My abiding memory of my father’s role . . . was that he seemed to spend endless time in an old coinbox phone in our hall,” Seán O’Rourke says of his father, Kevin.

“I remember when my father died in 1978 it was recalled that he had a difficult time in securing the support of the Bishop of Galway, Dr Michael Browne, and that he literally had to put his foot in the door of his palace to secure an appointment.”

Ballinasloe-based Peadar Burns, father of Cronan, who was born with Down syndrome, recalls how there were branches in “every small town”. A lot of money could be raised in “bad times”, and “we must have saved the government thousands each year”.

Mountbellew
Pearl Finnegan, a founder of the Mountbellew branch, recalls how as a senior student nurse she spent many nights with Jimmy, a seven-year old child with a severe disability who had come in for surgery and kept other children away with his cries – until Finnegan discovered his fondness for the music of Joe Dolan.

During the 17 days he was in hospital, he had no visitors, and the hospital matron had to send a telegram, a letter and then a Garda car to locate the parents.

When his mother came, she was distraught, explaining that she had not had a night’s sleep since her son was born. Jimmy was admitted to St Brigid’s psychiatric hospital in Ballinasloe, and died two years later. The experience had a “profound effect on me”, Finnegan tells the authors.

Ability West’s chief executive Breda Crehan-Roche is also interviewed in the book. A qualified nurse who has been with the organisation since 1983, she held the association’s quality brief when it was the first of its type in Ireland to achieve accreditation.

She describes her passion for her work, how the organisation has benefited from being challenged by its clients, and how there are plans to develop more self-sufficiency in local areas.

The book was due to be published in time for the association’s 50th anniversary, but Ability West’s board decided against it, due, it says to the “substantial funding cuts” which it has experienced since 2008. “It is considered more appropriate that all funds be used for the provision of frontline services to children and adults with intellectual disability,” it says, and it is “hoped to revisit” publication at a later date.

Concerned that the work of so many people might be left untold, the Breatnachs have opted to publish the work online, drawing on a bank of archive photographs and contemporary portraits by David Ruffles.

A Caring World: Cion is Cúram – Working with Intellectual Disability in Galway: A history of the Galway Association/Ability West can be downloaded at acaringworld.wordpress.com/