THE social life of many people with mental handicaps ended this summer when they finished school, according to the National Association for the Mentally Handicapped of Ireland (NAMHI).
The people concerned are those whose disabilities are such that they are assessed as being incapable of finding work: in the open market, according to Ms Mary Boyd, spokeswoman for NAMHI.
The EU will only fund training for work, she says, and the future for those who cannot work lies in day care centres - but without funding many mental handicap services cannot provide day care places for those who need them.
Others, who received training, have found it impossible to get work in a competitive market and are condemned to stay at home.
Mr Ger South, of the Limerick Parents and Friends of the Mentally Handicapped, said the EU insistence that people must be capable of working in the open market before it will pay for services for them was causing great difficulties.
"Most will never see open employment because of competition from able bodies people," he said. "What happens to them then? They are going to be left there on the side of the road."
Families were in a state of uncertainty and upset as their mentally handicapped sons and daughters came to the end of their school years at the age of 18, he said.
He knew of one woman who "nearly had a nervous breakdown" when she was told there was no place for her son in a workshop.
"This is causing huge concern, he said.
According to Ms Boyd, the end of school or training means the end of the social life of the person with a serious mental handicap.
In school or training centres, "they are very happy with their own contemporaries, their ",friendships". When this is taken away, their "whole social existence" ends as well, she says. "They sit at home."
From that point on they rely on people who volunteer to socialise with them but "they are as normal in their feelings as you or I and they know the difference between the real and the voluntary".
The number of people affected is currently being worked out by the Department of Health but, she said, a total of about 1,300 people are believed to be without a day service they need. Some of these are young people waiting to go to school for the first time but others are people who have gone through the whole system including, in some cases, three years of training after finishing school and who have nothing to do at the end of it.
Day care centres or sheltered workshops are badly needed, she says.
A group of Cork parents is taking legal action to oblige the Minister for Education to keep their profoundly mentally handicapped sons and daughters at school beyond the age of 18. Their case is somewhat different in that their children only began school within the past few years on foot of a High Court judgement but they too are in the category of people who cannot qualify for EU training funds because they cannot hope to work in the open market.