Ms Karen O'Mahony:

When we started seven years ago we had 22 children and one room. Today we are share a community centre with 32 other groups. The community centre has been amazing. It has given us the car park. We have eight modular buildings that cater for social groups, computer training, siblings activities, therapies, etc. We have also brought a sports hall on site and established a horticulture site. We take up about 18,000 sq. ft. We have used every little piece of space we have, but this is not the ideal dream for Rainbow Club obviously. Many of our members come from right across the spectrum and they have many complex needs so keeping them in a safe environment is really important for us. We have identified a site in the local area that is owned by the HSE. We had looked at it six years ago as well. It is a perfect site for us as it would cater for all of our current needs and allow us to expand. There is a lot of conversation about what we do. We delivered the summer provision programme this year but we did not receive any funding for it. Many of the children who attended were children with complex needs. We catered for that.

It is not that hard to implement a service when you have the right people who know how to do it. We have worked hard on the extra parts of the club, the new cookery school, the new horticulture site for young adults and we have also been working on an autism course over the past five years. Rainbow Club is providing lots of different pieces and on one site it can have that lovely unique model under one umbrella. I have looked at the Maltese model as well. It is amazing. The model that we are looking at needs to be holistic, child-centred and family based. It must wrap around the whole family. Departments need to collaborate and that is the one message that comes out of Rainbow Club all the time. We are doing a bit of everything but we are making it work. It is working and it is helping. We have huge impact, and a lot of positive outcomes. We work 50 weeks of the year. We only close for Christmas. This is manageable if people have vision. We just need to get people to buy into that to see how it can happen with the right people. We have our eye on the health centre in Mahon and we really need to secure that in the long term.