Fighting for their voices

Parents get blamed for a lot, often unfairly. The latest example is an Irish Times survey in which 41 per cent of respondents held parents responsible for their children's literacy problems.

"Saying that parents are to blame really got to me," says Clothra, a speech and language therapist at Trinity College Dublin. "Don't blame the parents. They are the first to notice that something is wrong with their child and the first to fight for services for their child - and fight is what they have to do with children with special needs.

"I was extremely annoyed on behalf of parents who are trying to hammer on the doors of services and getting nowhere."

This is not a class thing. Clothra has had mothers with addiction and literacy problems of their own fighting for speech and language therapy for their children, right alongside educated middle-class parents who have the money to pay, but cannot get past waiting lists.

There is a two-year-plus waiting list for speech and language therapy in the Eastern Health Board. Children should be diagnosed at 18 to 24 months and have immediate therapy. Instead they are being assessed later, then put on two-year waiting lists - so they may be four or five years old before they get therapy - too late to maximise a child's potential.

Speech and language are fundamental to literacy, because a child cannot learn to read until the child comprehends the meaning of sounds. Fail the two-year-old with speech and language problems, and you are virtually condemning the child to a losing battle with literacy.

Speech and language problems affect one-in-10 children, and a significant proportion are going undiagnosed. "We're at crisis point," says Lisa Ryan, research fellow at the department of linguistics, University College Dublin. One mother of a child with complex speech and language problems, Geraldine Graydon of Killiney, Co Dublin, has "hit a brick wall" with ministers Charlie McCreevy, Frank Fahy and Micheal Martin. On behalf of the National Parents Council (Primary), she has argued that if you don't provide adequate speech and language therapy, you are denying children access to education - because it is their only avenue into it. Geraldine has fought for eight years on behalf of her son Andrew (10), who has Attention Deficit Disorder and aspects of Asperger's Syndrome. Geraldine, a mother of five children, has had a nightmare time getting Andrew the services he needs. While he is in a special school now, the battle is far from over.

"You need to look at every avenue, go with your instincts, and if an expert tells you something about your child you feel is not right, get another opinion. Go to a dozen different sources if you have to," she advises.

Clothra has had parents who from the time their child was 12 months of age knew something was wrong, and yet have been "passed from Billy to Jack". One mother gets up at 5.30 a.m. to bring one child to creche, so she can have her three-year-old child at TCD for therapy at 8 a.m. once a week. Her child has normal intelligence and comprehension, but he cannot talk. He should have been having therapy from the age of 18 months and, from the age of two-and-a-half, should have been placed in five-day-a-week intensive speech and language therapy programme, says Clothra.

State is to blame

If the State were to have the same level of provision of speech and language therapy as Britain or Northern Ireland, there would be 850 speech and language therapists working here. Instead we have are 250 "full-time equivalent posts", and 70 of these senior people have left the profession in the past two years, disheartened by poor pay (one-third less than teachers) and career structure.

A Labour Court expert group set up in 1997 took two and a half years to report and, when it did, more speech and language therapists left. The Education Act 1998, section 7, says the Minister should provide to students and their parents "speech therapy" services if they need them. So where are these services? When you've heard all this, you realise that, in the Irish Times survey, the 24 per cent of respondents who blamed Government policy were right.