Stuck for Words, RTÉ Radio 1, 7.00 p.m. Wednesday, October 6th.
RadioScope: Voice after voice recounted tales of embarrassment, shame, loneliness and fear. "They all used to laugh at me. They made my life a living hell at school," said one man, writes Iva Pocock
"The boys started slagging me big time," said another. A third man told of his phobia of speaking, and his apprehension at walking into a crowded room.
All of them have one thing in common - a stammer. The majority had experienced misunderstanding and abuse. Being tormented by teachers insisting they read aloud was a common theme, as was being bullied by other pupils. One man left school at 16 because he was teased and ridiculed so much.
The men (and one woman) interviewed began stammering when they were little. "I realised I had a stammer at the tender age of six and this, I felt, really held me back in life," said one man.
Another associates his stammer with being slapped by a nurse for refusing to eat a pill after having had his tonsils out. It's a scene he will remember to his dying day.
The contributors talked of their strategies for coping. Most were avoidance strategies - avoiding words, avoiding company, avoiding telephones, avoiding reality by drinking.
One man recalled his fear of asking for certain items in a shop - he'd prefer to drive five miles to a supermarket which stocked things on accessible shelves.
Some avoided troublesome words by substituting others. One contributor used "start the computer" because "log on" and "log off" were difficult for him to say.
One of two speech therapists interviewed told a sorry tale of a stammerer who would pub crawl until he found a watering hole that didn't sell Beamish. Only then would he approach the barman. He'd ask for Beamish, knowing the answer and hoping to be offered his preferred pint, whose name he couldn't pronounce - Guinness.
One stammerer's phobia of saying "hello" was initially circumvented by greeting people with "eh hello". It deteriorated to "ehh yeh hello" and then got to a stage where he'd hail clients with "ah-yes-mmm-yes-well-yeh hello".
The programme focused on the interviewees' experiences of therapy and their search for a cure. Speech therapy, hypnotherapy and a breathing technique called the McGuire programme brought short-term benefits to some. But it was only on accepting that stammering is a physical manifestation of a psychological problem, for which there is no cure, that sufferers made progress.
"I did actually search for a cure and I believed that by sheer determination I could get one," said one stammerer. "But it's not going to happen. Until the day I die it'll always be there. It's a fundamental part of me and that's fine."
Stammerers need counselling to get rid of the emotional baggage, says one of the speech therapists. A stammerer himself, he qualified at the age of 33. Previously he trained as an electrical technician, a job he reckoned wouldn't require much talk. Stammering is like an iceberg as most of it is hidden underwater, he says.
After accepting it, the next step is to learn techniques for controlling the stammer such as slowing down one's speech and breaking down the fear surrounding it.
Compiler and presenter Michael Carolan gives a fascintaing insight and a rare voice to some of the 45,000 people in Ireland who live with a stammer.