Ms Cara Steinmetz:

The question for me was about speech and language therapy and how we have managed to ensure we have no waiting lists. It has been really tough, if I am honest. We know how many members we have. We have 400 members in Down Syndrome Cork and we know the age groups of the various members so we have tailored our speech and language therapy programme. For example, someone gets a block of six sessions for their child and within that six sessions there is a specific programme that they will work on and the speech therapist will share the notes of that with them. They are also willing to share it with the school and they give very proactive exercises that can be done with the child at home that fall into the goals of the block of six sessions. We spread that to as many children who need it as we can.

In addition, we do speech and language therapy camps. We mentioned the Field of Dreams earlier which we are so lucky to have and it is a fantastic facility. It has been through a partnership with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine that we could build that site. We use it for speech and language therapy camps at the weekends where we bring a group of children who are at the same level and the same age and can benefit from the group session. We do summer camps and use different creative approaches as opposed to just one-on-one speech therapy with all of the children in our membership. It has worked very well. Nobody will get weekly speech therapy for the entire year but they will get blocks of six and then they will have activities they can work with while they wait for their next block. It has been very successful.

It is not free for parents, they pay for it, but the fundraising we do in Down Syndrome Cork pays for the therapists, who are amazing. We have incredible speech and language therapists who are specialised in children with Down's syndrome, which is very beneficial to our kids and to our older groups also. We try to use as much of that fundraising as possible to subsidise the speech and language therapy sessions so that it is not too expensive for parents.