Kathryn Sinnott held a quiet celebration at home with her children after the High Court vindicated her 23-year struggle to secure basic primary education for her autistic son, Jamie. It was the second celebration in as many weeks - last week she marked her 50th birthday.

Home is a large, modern bungalow sited at the end of a rutted boreen in picturesque Ballinhassig, an oasis of calm just 20 minutes outside Cork city.

The house is full of light, with wooden floors and spacious rooms. The playroom is lined floor to ceiling with books, and Lego is dotted across the floor.

"This house is thanks to the Mary Black thing," Kathryn smiles, a reference to the successful musical partnership of her estranged husband, Declan Sinnott, with the singer.

Jamie, who will be 23 next week, is seated at the kitchen table, clutching his ears, uninterested in this latest visitor. He's already had a procession of experts visit him over the past year, related to his legal action, and in recent days he's been in the media spotlight.

But his eyes light up when his mother places a basket of samosas in front of him. He loves food but has to wait until they cool down. He understands hot, doesn't speak but grunts. A tall man, he stands at the counter and chews the tablecloth in anticipation. "Don't eat my tablecloth," his mother groans in a resigned voice.

All but one of Kathryn's nine children, six boys and three girls aged six to 27, live at home. The eldest girl, Brigid (25), is studying and working with autistic children in the US.

Brigid has outlined what the long struggle for Jamie has cost the Sinnotts as a family.

"I remember just continuing frustration. There was a time when we didn't have a car, and I remember Jamie in a buggy and just all being wrapped up, and going to this meeting and that meeting and going to knock on this door and that door, and Mammy trying bits of programmes at home. Continually writing letters, that might sound terrible, but there was so much letter-writing, there was so much knocking on doors, there was so much going to meetings.

Every avenue was checked.

"We, all of us, sad as it sounds, stopped believing long before Mammy ever did. She was still believing something was going to come along, and this promise was going to be kept."

If the many administrators, doctors, nurses, teachers, State agencies and service-providers she has dealt with over the years in an increasingly desperate battle to get services for Jamie had been honest with her, and said there was nothing, it all might have been different, Kathryn says. She might have gone back to Chicago, or gone to court much sooner.

There was no honesty. She kept trying and only went to court as a last resort. Mr Justice Barr's judgment this week, unless successfully appealed, will vastly improve the quality of life for Jamie and hundreds of severely mentally handicapped and autistic persons across the State.

The judge ruled that the State had a constitutional obligation to provide for free primary education for such persons for as long as they might benefit from it. He found Jamie had received less than two years' meaningful primary education and awarded Jamie and Kathryn £255,000 in damages.

The decision came 30 years after Kathryn Kelly arrived in Ireland. Her grandfather was born and raised here and emigrated to the US in his 20s. His son, John, Kathryn's father, is a surgeon in Chicago, and Kathryn and her 13 siblings were born and raised there. She holds dual Irish and US citizenship.

After spending two years studying history in the US, she came to Ireland to pursue a BA in UCD. While there, in 1970, she met through friends the musician Declan Sinnott, formerly of Moving Hearts.

They married a year later. Joady, now aged 27, was their first-born, followed two years later by Brigid. Then Jamie was born and life changed irrevocably. Kathryn divides it into two distinct phases which she labels BJ and AJ, Before Jamie and After Jamie.

A small, vivacious, almost painfully slim woman, it's easy to see why Mr Justice Barr declared that Kathryn "appears to have worn herself almost literally to the bone struggling on behalf of her son". It was a struggle in which she met with evasion, misinformation, suspicion and even hostility.

She recalls being regarded with deep suspicion by nurses providing a "baby-sitting service" for Jamie, nurses who had been lectured in the late 1970s by Dr Paddy Murray, a Southern Health Board psychiatrist, now deceased, to the effect that children were made autistic by cold, unloving mothers - "refrigerator mothers".

When Jamie was one, she was told to take him home and "watch it [autism] develop". She was also told to put Jamie in an institution. "Dr Murray constantly told me Jamie was going to ruin my life. He said I was young, with two other kids, and should forget Jamie and get on with my life.

"That was the system. The kids were taken away, the State would give the service-providers money, society was saved from having to look at or deal with them, the service-providers just provided a mop-up service and parents were told they were better off. It was `Just put him away, forget about it, have another one'. That was the thinking."

Her experiences transformed Kathryn into a campaigner. "When I look at what I was like before Jamie, I was one of those craft people, me and the kids, we made things. I pull stuff out of the attic and say that couldn't have been me, that was another person. We painted and we sowed and we gardened, me and my two eldest kids. They knew all the songs and they had stories read to them all the time.

"I was a real sort of hands-on mother. That sort of person disappeared long ago."

"Now I'm a campaigner. I've an office. I always had a bit of a corner with bits of fabric for projects and things, leaves we'd gathered. That doesn't exist now. I don't have that in my house now. I have this," she says, pointing to shelves packed with books on autism and disability and files with titles like "Jamie's Health".

"It's not even wanting the best for my child. I couldn't get away from it. Septembers would come, the other kids would go to school and it'd be, like, you have to do something. I think I developed this simply because I had to. There was no other way. No one else was going to do it for me."

With other parents she formed the Association for the Severe and Profoundly Handicapped in 1983 and, in 1996, the HOPE project, which provides information to parents with disabled and autistic children. Kathryn estimates there are now some 600 parents in contact with HOPE.

"We get the latest research out to parents. There's something about the way the Civil Service works here, that everything must be made as difficult for you as possible and, as much as possible, it has to be denied you. Because we've been through this, we try and help parents cut some of the corners."

It's been a lonely battle. "My husband left a few times. It [the campaign for Jamie] was part of the reason, certainly the amount of work I put into it, the amount of responsibility and hassle. There's no way it doesn't impact on your relationship.

"We all have suffered as a family because we weren't able to be a family. It has had an impact on every one of my kids, in denying them time, denying them focus. I am here all the time, but the focus that they needed, particularly on their things, wasn't there. They were also denied their brother, someone they could have had activities with, someone to be proud of. The system made it clear they could go to school but it didn't want Jamie."

She hopes the worst is over. "Going to court gave me incredible hope. We were taken seriously. Jamie was important. That judge really allowed us. We always thought so, but the judge really allowed us to see Jamie as important again, and the State really had to face what they did, even though they still didn't, even to the last day.

"I'm determined and very hopeful that Jamie is going to start junior infants. He won't ever be what he should have been, and I'm irrevocably a different person than I would have been, for better or worse. But hopefully he will be able to get a chance to communicate and get some control of his life."