Jessica de Salvo, aged three, hands her father Marc a plastic card with a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine. This is Jessica's way of telling her father she wants a Thomas video put on now.
In the kitchen are similar cards that she uses to tell her father what she wants. Jessica is autistic and this week she begins getting a special education in a classroom in her home in Celbridge, Co Kildare.
It cost her father more than £30,000 to have it built and stocked with special materials. He has had to remortgage his house to get the money and financially he is not sure how he will cope in the future. The Department of Education has refused to provide the funds for the class. In the new year Marc begins a legal action against it, claiming the State should pay for his daughter's education at home. The cards and other materials are part of a new teaching method for autistic children known as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). The Department favours a cheaper method known as TEACCH, which involves one teacher working with six children.
Marc says ABA, which sees one-on-one tuition, involves autistic children learning simple tasks like sitting and walking. These tasks are broken into tiny steps and the child learns them through repetition.
"Before ABA came along I had to teach Jessica to sit down. I was able to do this because she enjoys television. I would turn the television off if she stood up, so she soon learned how to sit and remain sitting if she wanted to see Barney," he says. Jessica has already received some ABA education and is making progress. "If you had seen her a few months ago, she would see right through you. Her attention span was incredibly short and she would constantly let out high-pitched screams," he says. She could not even hold up her arms when being dressed in the morning, he adds. "Autism is like having a computer without a keyboard, there is nothing wrong with the computer but it is hard to communicate with it without the right tools." However, with a few ABA lessons Jessica is a different child, and while the odd scream can be heard in their kitchen, the fair-haired girl ostensibly acts like any other child her age.
Her father approached almost every primary school in Co Kildare this year asking them to accept Jessica for her pre-school year and beyond. The Department of Education told him it could not oblige the schools to take Jessica. Schools with autistic units were full, says Marc.
"I realised then I would have to take the bull by the horns myself and build a class for her. Time is the crucial factor in this, in even 18 months an autistic child can learn a lot of bad behavioural habits. One child I know had to have her hands bandaged so she would stop chewing her fingers and making them bleed," he says.
Kathy Sinnott, whose son Jamie is autistic, was at the opening of Jessica's class last Friday. She also champions the ABA method and says the Government should pay for children educated in this way. The Department is appealing a High Court judgment in favour of Kathy to the Supreme Court and so refuses to comment on individual cases.
However, it points out that the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, recently set up a task force on autism which will devise new ways to meet the needs of these children and their parents. Marc and Kathy say they have no faith in the task force, although they have made submissions to it.
Marc claims research shows that 47 per cent of children taught through ABA subsequently enter mainstream classes, and fewer than 2 per cent who learn by the TEACCH method do so.
Kathy remembers one official's comment several years ago, that "autistic kids used to be kept in sheds, at least that is over".
Things may have moved on, but she claims the Government is still more concerned with keeping costs down than providing proper facilities for autistic children. The task force will have to address such issues in its report, expected soon.
Meanwhile, Marc says he has had many letters from parents like him, forced to remortgage their houses to get their autistic child the education they want. "I just do not understand why we all have to go to court to get our rights vindicated," he says.
Emmet Oliver can be reached at eoliver@irish-times.ie
Information on autistic children and services available for them can be found at www.hopeireland.com