Dr. Susan Crawford:

-----in the past year, education boards around our communities having sensory kits available in public places such as lifeguard huts, churches, community centres etc.

We have started making the changes from the ground up. People know, when they identify when there is something different or when something is emerging for a preschooler who is not engaging with other preschoolers, that they need to intervene, and the earlier and clearer the diagnosis, the better. Only yesterday, I was speaking to a GP who was in tears telling me he could not access private-diagnosis psychology reporting. Again, it has to meet the exact criteria of the HSE psychologists, which nobody can access.

All those issues need to be addressed. The top-down issue needs to be shuffled and shaken up and, equally, from the bottom up, we need to start getting stuck in early on. I always tell people when I am doing training that they should not wait for a diagnosis but rather get down on the ground and start engaging with their child, and it is the same for teachers in schools. If they notice that a child is not able to communicate, they should start using pictures and implementing some type of intervention rather than leave him or her alone. Every week is a week that cannot be gotten back. It is never too late to learn a new skill, but we should not allow somebody to have to wait weeks, months or years for an intervention.

The needs of autistic people change all the time. More than 30% of our population have a learning disability, so these long-term needs will evolve and change. I specifically gave our case study as an example. This is a young man with a diagnosis of autism, a learning disability, speech and language disorder and epilepsy - you name it; it is out there - but that is not unusual. He is entirely unique. Nevertheless, we had to go each step of the way and search for expertise somewhere else. It was very challenging. The HSE was not opening its arms to me and saying "Well done, this is fantastic". I had to battle every step of the way to implement simple change and pay for it privately, bringing in those people, even though public psychiatrists, nurses and so on were sitting in on talks about catatonia of autism because they did not know what it was.

All those issues need to be addressed. I always think of how quickly the smoking ban was implemented in this country and how people stuck to it. If you want to be the change you want to see, you can do it and that is the bottom line. We can talk about it forever and we are so right. Why do we have to wait for somebody to take a case to say we have to do something about A, B or C? If we implemented change as it was needed, we would save a fortune for the Exchequer, aside from anything else, if that might motivate legislators. There are so many simple interventions that, if adhered to and implemented on time, can make the difference, and that is what I find most frustrating when I hear ongoing stories. I have travelled this journey since 1996 and, for goodness sake, 27 years later, we are still here talking about what we do not have. There is something seriously wrong.