Families ready for Cavan autism march

Families of young children with autism are preparing for a protest march in Cavan Town aimed at highlighting what they feel are unacceptable delays in providing crucial therapeutic interventions in the region.

Coinciding with March for Our Children 'Enough is Enough!' campaigns elsewhere in the country, the demonstration will begin at the Cavan Courthouse at 10am on Monday, April 3.
Protestors will march past the constituency offices of local elected Oireachtas members to the HSE offices at Connolly Street in Cavan Town where a petition will be handed in, before continuing the circuit back to the starting point.
'We've been faced down too long and we're now left with years and years of waiting lists. There are a lot of families just fed up with it all at this point,' says march organiser Orla Curran, mother of a young boy attending the local Child Development Team (CDT) who has suffered significant delays in terms of accessing services.
The group has attracted almost 7,000 signatures, an increase of nearly 2,000 in the past week, for a petition calling on Minister for Health Simon Harris and Minister of State Helen McEntee to implement 'urgent action' for children and adults with special needs in Ireland.
'We are advocates for our children, my son is non-verbal so I am his only voice. If we don't speak up now about the lack of early interventions, what's going to happen in the future for them? It’s now they need that help,' Ms Curran tells The Anglo-Celt.
She explains that those frustrations are not simply borne out of delays dating back weeks or months but resulting from years of knock-backs, with parents left with no other choice but to explore expensive privately-funded alternatives or interventions themselves.
'The likes of Simon Harris has first-hand experience of this with his brother Adam. He knows what Adam went through and the challenges they had. It’s a case of - if you don't have money to pay for private therapies, you're child gets left on the heap with nothing, absolutely nothing,' says Orla, who has completed courses that encourage parents of children with autism to become therapists.
'I shouldn't have to but that's the position I'm left in. That last course was on challenging behaviour and I'm doing another course in two-weeks time on anxiety. Again, it’s run by parents. I rang the psychologist two months ago and was told blankly that 'Shaun is not on my list, I can't answer you're question'. What do you do?
'This isn't just a local issues or a regional issue, this is nationally that families with young children with these extra needs are being failed. Every story you read online, wherever they're from, it’s the same. Nobody is getting access to these services. Something has to change.'
A local meeting at the Cavan Crystal Hotel last week set in train the planned march, which acknowledges World Autism Day a day earlier.
The HSE has admitted that referrals to the CDT locally have increased by 156% in the past five years. To the end of last year, there were 540 children on the HSE waiting list, 180 of whom have been waiting in excess of 18 months to be seen by a therapist.
A similar case has been made in respect of physiotherapy services, where there are currently 308 children on HSE waiting lists locally, with the longest waiting 144 weeks - or more than two and a half years.
Referrals to the CDT for physio have increased almost 100 per cent over the past half-decade, with no associated increase in staffing levels in the region.
Meanwhile there are more than 70 children awaiting ASD diagnosis locally and 420 children across Cavan-Monaghan on a list waiting to received psychological assessment.