'We would normally have dreadful summer holidays worrying about going back to school," says Teresa Kavanagh. "He would look at the new books, say I'll never handle that and dump them on the floor."
Teresa's nine-year-old son was frustrated and demoralised by his dyslexia. Despite the best efforts of his teachers at his Co Dublin school, "we had him going to bed at night roaring crying, saying he should be in senior infants, he was too dumb for his class," she recalls.
This summer, everything is different. Her son enjoys reading and looks forward to returning to school. What made the difference was visiting Martin Murphy last October and working through the 28-day parent/child programme he devised.
"We were nearly a full day with him," she says.
"He taught us his method of visual reading and remembering words by remembering visually rather than phonetically. He had him spelling huge words."
Teresa and her husband were still sceptical, though. They wondered if there was some trick to it all and if the benefit would disappear as soon as they got home. But they began to work the programme and the results came through. A child who had been unable to spell a word longer than three letters was suddenly getting marks of 80 to 100 per cent in his school spelling tests.
It was the same story with his reading. His reading age has gone from about zero to seven since he saw Murphy, says his mother, and she looks forward to what another year will bring.
"We are definitely happy with the progress he has made," says Teresa. "His self esteem is huge."
When Irene Stevenson rang up Martin Murphy about her daughter Daisy's difficulty with reading, he told her it sounded as though Irene herself had it too, only worse.
It turned out that what Irene, over the years, had jokingly called her "dyslexia problem" - words swimming on the page or a sudden inability to spell a simple word - was the real thing.
Irene's first inkling that her very bright daughter might have a problem with reading occurred when Daisy told her she had been brought with some other students to do a test in one of the classrooms in the secondary school.
When Irene inquired she was told her daughter's entrance exam had revealed a slight problem and that the test was to check on progress.
She had improved.
Nevertheless, Irene was concerned and when a friend told her about Murphy she made an appointment for them both to see him.
Now Irene is helping her daughter to work through the 28-day programme devised by Murphy but she is benefiting herself as well.
"The words aren't jumping," she says. As a reader, Irene "heard" what she was reading.
Using Murphy's method, she visualises what she is reading, as a video with colour and sound. She is now enjoying her reading far more than before.
In the past, when Daisy read, she visualised what she was seeing in black and white pictures but now she, too, uses the video technique.
Daisy has gone from having little or no interest in reading - Irene has stocked the local library with the books Daisy wouldn't read over the years, she says - to sitting down and reading magazines because she wants to.