For 20 years, Mark O'Mahony's stammer was so bad he couldn't pronounce his own name - but now he has learned to speak as smoothly as anyone else, he tells Padraig O'Morain
Whenever Dubliner Mark O'Mahony got a taxi to his home in Artane he was never quite sure where he would end up.
Dogged by a stammer for the best part of 20 years, Mark often simply could not pronounce his address - so instead, he would ask to be taken to an address which he was able to say, and walked the rest of the way home.
His stammer also cost him a £25 fine on the bus. He had asked for the bus fare he was able to pronounce which, unfortunately, wasn't the right one. The inspector, he recalls, wasn't interested in his explanation.
He remembers exactly when the stammering started.
One day, when he was about four years of age, "I was messing in the class". A teacher of whom he was afraid called in his mother. The teacher demanded that he state whether he had been messing, "yes or no".
"I just couldn't answer," he says. After that: "I developed a problem speaking in front of her in the class." For a short while the stammer was confined to the classroom - but before long it began to affect him everywhere. As he puts it, "it went outside the classroom and into my life".
As he grew up, his life was built around the stammer: "I avoided going out, I avoided social scenes". His coping mechanism of saying what he was able to say instead of what he wanted to say, meant that "I could go to buy a pint of Guinness and come back with a vodka and orange". If he wanted to buy cigarettes - he was a smoker until January - he would ask for a Mars Bar, a can of coke and God knows what else until the name of the brand of cigarettes came out. "I could end up buying £5 or £10 worth of stuff before I could buy the smokes." If asked his name, he would give whatever name he was able to pronounce. The same applied to his phone number, the names of his sisters, the names of his girlfriends.
"It affected my selection of college courses. I applied to do physics in DCU but I found out you had to do a presentation in the first year and I wouldn't go." He was also interested in counselling as a profession - but how could he be a counsellor if he couldn't talk? After 20 years of stammering, he read a newspaper article about an approach called the McGuire Programme. He was sceptical. It cost about £600.
He gave it a miss. Then a colleague told him about a neighbour who overcame stammering through learning the technique. He also learned that the fee did not have to be paid until the second day of the course and that he could walk away if he was not impressed by the end of day one. In 1999, he signed up for the programme, held in a Dublin hotel.
"It's a four-day intensive course. Everybody on the course is also a recovering stammerer." The programme was started by an American stammerer, Dave McGuire, who initially based the work on breathing techniques used by opera singers.
It's a complex technique at the start but "I was flying by the end of the first day. The second day brought a considerable improvement". Fear reduction is a key part of the McGuire Programme and part of that, in turn, is going down and making a speech in a public place.
"We did a public speech on Grafton Street on the Saturday afternoon. We got up on a soapbox and screamed a speech.
"In that course everyone is in the same position as yourself. You get a certain degree of confidence because of that. The day I came home after the course I had all my friends and family come down. I played a tape of how I was the first day going into the course. Then everyone saw the videotape of me howling on Grafton Street. They couldn't believe it."
Since then, his life has been on an upward trajectory.
"My confidence level has soared." He is in the first year of a two-year course at the Elah school of counselling in Dublin where, a couple of weeks ago, he sailed through the delivery of a three-hour presentation.
The Irish contact for the McGuire Programme is Joe O'Donnell at 074-25781 or 086-3429602. The fee is €984. The McGuire Programme website is at www.mcguire-freedomsroad.com
An Irish website www.irishmcguiregrads.freeservers.com/ has been put up by graduates of the programme here