An Irish intellectual disability service has helped to improve conditions for people with intellectual disabilities in the former Soviet state of Georgia by providing training for senior Georgian staff in Dublin.
St Michael's House in Ballymun has voluntarily provided intensive training for two psychologists, a social worker and an education co-ordinator who work with the First Step charity in Georgia. They recently returned home to plan workshops to pass on this knowledge to colleagues.
St Michael's House provides community-based supports and service for more than 1,500 people with learning disabilities and their families, in Dublin city and county.
The link between St Michael's House and Georgia began in 2004 after senior officials from the Georgian government visited the service. They had heard about it from Wexford woman Jane Corboy, co-founder of the First Step charity.
She was familiar with Georgia because her husband, Denis, had been EU Ambassador and EU special envoy to the country. In 1995 she visited an orphanage in Kaspi and was appalled by the neglect of the children.
"Nothing I had ever seen could have prepared me for that orphanage," she said. "It was absolutely horrendous. In the winter of 1993/1994, 24 children had died from sheer neglect in this place, just two hours from Tbilisi [ the capital]. In the former Soviet Union, there was enormous stigma attached to any form of disability."
One survey of 450 children in orphanages found that in 50 of the cases, the children's mothers had been told by relatives or doctors that they had died at birth because of the shame of having a child with a disability.
Ms Corboy set up the charity with Nino Zhvania, who also visited the orphanage that day and whose husband, Zurab, would later become prime minister of Georgia.
Ms Corboy said the Georgian delegation's visit to St Michael's House had a profound effect on the organisation of intellectual services in Georgia. "That visit had the effect of fast-tracking the programme in Georgia by probably three years," she said.
