Five-year-old Louie Feeney, like many children his age, is singing songs, counting and knows his alphabet. But Louie, who has Down syndrome, required help in the form of speech and language therapy to get him to this stage and that came at a cost.
His mother Sandra Kehoe, a GP based in Carlow town and a member of Down Syndrome Carlow, a lobby group seeking improvements in early intervention services locally, has spent thousands of euro on speech and language therapy despite her son being entitled to the service publicly.
Although Louie received a public assessment at the age of six months due to issues around his ability to swallow – an area covered by speech and language therapy – he was then told he wouldn’t get further therapy for another year.
Ms Kehoe described the care received by her son through the public system since then as “intermittent and inconsistent”.
While she said the local therapists were “brilliant”, she said they were “overworked and understaffed”.
Recognising that early intervention was essential in her son’s care, Ms Kehoe decided to take the private route.
It was not cheap: as well as paying for the services, it also meant taking time off work as well as the travel costs associated with accessing services in Dublin (although she has since been able to access therapy privately in Carlow).
She has seen a return: “It’s lovely to see how he fits in his community – he’s in a mainstream Montessori four days a week. He has about eight-to 10-word, fully constructed sentences. He has his little friends and he can converse completely normally with them”.
However, she acknowledged that, while she is in a position to afford private care, a route which many other parents in her position have taken, there are many others who cannot.
“I am very grateful that I have the knowledge, the awareness and the finances to fund this privately. Others do not have that choice. As a parent and as a GP I feel it’s morally wrong that other children do not have the same opportunity.”