Parents of mentally handicapped children and adults in the South are on the march again. Within the past two weeks, groups from all over Ireland met in Dublin to form a National Parents' Alliance to campaign for basic services, including residential care for those who need it.
While they are not revealing their exact tactics, a march on the Dail is almost mandatory. It is a familiar sight in the Republic but not so familiar in the North, where services have been far more readily available. Yet signs of scarcity are beginning to emerge there too.
"There are fewer and fewer residential options for people with learning disabilities," says a spokeswoman for Mencap, the premier campaigning organisation for people with mental handicaps in the UK.
In the South, almost every gathering of people involved with mental handicap hears complaints from those who have spent years on waiting lists and living in very trying circumstances in the meantime.
This will be one of the issues on which the National Parents' Alliance will focus. "You have elderly parents minding elderly handicapped children," says its spokeswoman, Ms Mary Mac Aodha. And in some areas outside Dublin, she says, "there are still delays in getting day care."
Absence of day care deprives the mentally handicapped person of stimulation and deprives the family of any kind of break during the day. In the North, day services have always been more readily available than in the South, but there, too, day services are starting to be rationed in some areas, according to Mencap.
"There's an increase in pressure on day services," its spokeswoman said, "and this could increase dramatically over the next couple of years".
Statements such as these provide, perhaps, the first straws in the wind that the disability movement in Northern Ireland may find itself campaigning, Southern-style, for adequate services in the future.
As it stands, "everything in the garden is not rosy", according to Ms Liz Aiken, chairwoman of PAPA (Parents and Professionals and Autism). She considers herself more fortunate than some other parents in Northern Ireland. When her son, Ryan, who is now 15, was a toddler he attended a paediatric support unit run by Barnardos before going on to a special school.
But she feels she got little support from the social services once he went to special school until she began to make demands. Currently, her son gets a weekend a month in a respite unit, something which some parents in the South would envy.
"In Northern Ireland there still are older parents looking after middle-aged mentally handicapped adults," she says. "Some of these adults can be very challenging. The parents may not have wanted them to go into residential care full-time. But they may very well need some kind of respite care and that is not always available."
Location has a great deal to do with the services people receive in the South as well. The Irish Times spoke to parents in Donegal who are, by and large, satisfied with the service they receive. The children of the people we spoke to are relatively young and residential care has not, perhaps, become as big an issue with them as it will when they are older. Parents in Limerick, on the other hand, expressed greater dissatisfaction. They are unhappy at what they see as a lack of back-up services - speech therapists, educational psychologists, for instance - for autistic children in the education system. Anne O'Connor of the Dochas parents' group in the mid-western region also talks about the absence of very basic types of support. She knows one parent whose child cannot travel on a school bus because the bus does not have a care assistant. As a result, the mother "drives the child 44 miles each way to school every day". In the Republic the anger at lack of services is sharper but it seems entirely possible that the sense of injustice will grow in Northern Ireland if the pressure which is beginning to be felt on services continues.
In the South, campaigns by disability activists and parents' groups have brought about a great deal of positive change in the past 10 years. But much remains to be done, with suspicions among activists that the forthcoming National Disability Authority will have fewer teeth than they want it to have, and that there is a great deal of work to be done on issues ranging from access to buildings to access to jobs.
And what that means is that social services on both parts of the island can expect to be confronted by increasingly skilful and sophisticated disability campaigners in the years ahead.
Series concluded