Ms Hilda Duignan:

Ms Claire Earley and I represent Autism Parents Athlone. Back in February 2022, Ms Earley set up a Facebook group, Autism Parents Athlone, with the intention of making Athlone a more autism friendly town. After Claire asked me to come on board with the group, which I was delighted about, little did we know that we would become local advocates for so many families in the town with regard to helping get school places set up. Currently in the town there are four secondary schools. Up until last week, only one of those secondary schools had two classes for children with autism. These classes were subscribed for the next two to three years with no places currently becoming available until 2025 in that school. Just last week, we are delighted that Athlone Community College opened its special class, which was due to open in September 2022. Due to red tape and more paperwork - and everybody has spoken about why does it takes so long - in June 2022 there were 12 children who had no school places in Athlone for September. They were offered places in Ballymahon or Glenamaddy, which are 50 km trips each way. As Ms O'Mahony has said, these journeys are just too long for our children. Siblings are being separated with regard to school places and parents are having to give up employment because they must be there for the children who cannot attend school. Last week, school places open for six of those children but six more are in inappropriate school positions. They have accepted places rather than not have places, whether they are appropriate for them or not. Obviously, we are very grateful to see the places opening but we are not done with one. More places need to be opened at both primary and secondary level schools around Athlone for children with autism.

My own story is that I am a mother of four children. My younger two are six years and four years old and both have been diagnosed with autism. Both children have extremely different presentation and both have had very different journeys to being diagnosed, even though there is only 22 months between them in age. My first child to be diagnosed is Edie who is six. She was accepted by the early intervention team in Roscommon in February 2019. It was a very straightforward process for us, thankfully, as our first outing in the autism world. We had a wonderful early intervention nurse who come to us every second week to help us with play practice for our daughter, with guidance on how to observe her in the home, and she made recommendations and took on board our concerns which she brought back to our multidisciplinary team in Roscommon. We were put forward for an autism diagnostic observation schedule assessment, ADOS, and diagnosed by August 2019. That was it. She received no services since then. We were fortunate to be able to avail of the home tuition grant. We had a fabulous tutor and she then went into an early intervention preschool class, which had just opened in time for her age group to participate. She has never had formal speech and language therapy. She is what one might call verbal but not conversational, and it is only in the last 18 months or so we could say that. Other than that she would have been considered non- or pre-verbal. She has never had any occupational therapy that we had not paid for. She has never had any psychology assessment since her initial diagnosis. Our son is four years old since November. He was accepted by the same early intervention team in May 2021 but he was never seen by them because the transition to CDNT happened in November 2021 and then the services were just not there. We ended up having to go for a private diagnosis for our son. This cost us €1,500 and two trips from Athlone to Limerick and back. Again, this involved trying to make arrangements for our other three children, one of whom has autism, so we could both be there for our son's assessment. We accessed that assessment and diagnosis so that he could avail of the same early intervention preschool class that her daughter had access to. Our daughter is now in junior infants in an autism class attached to a mainstream school but it is not the same school where she attended early intervention.

I have four children in schools in three different counties. How is this right in 2023? My six-year-old daughter is collected at 9 a.m. from my home and she travels to Ballinasloe in County Galway. It is not a very long journey - it is 20 minutes - but she is in Ballinasloe in County Galway for her school. My four-year-old son is collected at 8.30 a.m. in the morning from my house. In order to pick up six other children it takes 45 minutes to do a 16 km journey to his school door-to-door on the bus. He is on the bus for 45 minutes each way because it collects children all around the town. He is four years of age. He is exhausted by the time he gets to school and often he falls asleep on the way to school or on the way home from school, and this impacts on his night's sleep, which is pretty poor anyway as many other parents of children with autism will identify with. His school is in Athlone in County Westmeath. I also have a son and daughter of seven and eight years old who attend our local primary school, which is 3.5 km from our house.

They could practically walk. They are in Drum, County Roscommon. I am dealing with teachers, principals and public health in three different counties for my children. Thankfully, they get school buses. I cannot even imagine trying to travel a 32 km round trip every single day, which I did do until their buses were granted after the Covid-19 crisis. Of course, everything was delayed and there were no bus services for the children.

Another area in which Ms Earley and I are involved is in social inclusion for children with autism. We have set up the Infinity Friends autism social clubs. We started in September 2022 with ten children and we now have five clubs. We now, since September of last year, have services for 50 families in Athlone. Not only has it become a social club for the children, it has evolved and developed into a social club for the parents, because every single one of these parents in this Chamber could be a member of our club. We have met them all before and they have all met us before. I am echoing so many stories. Every single story I have heard so far this morning I could pull from either my own experience or the experience of the people we meet every week in our club.