The Government should focus as much on those who need it most as it does on the bank crisis, writes KEITH DUFFY
TODAY IS World Autism Awareness Day. This year most of us won’t notice, and that’s not just because it happens to fall on Good Friday. It’s because the entire country has been trying to understand the huge numbers that were thrown around on Tuesday.
Container loads of money are being shipped off to the banks. And for anyone who has worked for an Irish charity, who has begged the Government for money for people in desperate need, it’s sickening. None of us has looked for anything other than a small fraction of the figures we’ve been reading about this week.
Some of us have been lucky, others not. But that’s not the point – when it comes to people with disabilities, the poor or the sick it shouldn’t be a case of getting lucky. Our Government should be applying the same level of cunning and inventiveness to finding solutions for those who need them most as they have to tackling this banking crisis.
A Nama for charities and a bailout for volunteers would be great. The only thing certain after the week we’ve had is that we won’t get either.
The strange thing is that not tackling the problems faced by children with autism costs money in the long run. The later a child is diagnosed with the condition, the more money has to be spent on their education and medical care. More importantly, the later the diagnosis the greater the chance that the child will end up in the care of the State long term. And that costs a fortune.
You would think the Government would be interested in finding out exactly how much more it would cost. You might even think the Government would be interested in finding out exactly how many people in the country have autism. You would be wrong.
We – Irish Autism Action – have started a research project to find out how many children are being born each week in Ireland with autism. We’re doing that research in partnership with Dublin City University. We asked the Department of Health if they wanted to get involved. We didn’t even look for money from them.
They said no.
So we’ll plough on ourselves and we should have an answer by World Autism Awareness Day 2011.
And we will use some of the money that we have raised from the extraordinary generosity of the people of Ireland to find out how much money the country can save by intervening early. Because untreated autism tends to get worse, we know there is money to be saved – we just want to have a figure we can stand over.
The bad news is that once we have the information we’re looking for we’ll be looking for your help. Not money this time – although we are always delighted when you give us money. This time we’ll need your support. Because we’ll be hassling everyone we can find in Government to make sure they understand what the current lack of policy is costing us. And how much it will eventually cost us. Every one of us. Because this is a bill the Irish taxpayer will have to pay.
What we’ll need you to do is tell every TD, councillor and Senator you meet that this matters. That caring for the weakest in our society is so important that it will affect how you look at each political party. That the next time a government is being selected there must be a full cabinet place set aside to tackle the problems faced by the people with truly difficult lives. That we recognise that this is not charity. This is vital. This is unavoidable.
And this is not just for children and adults with autism. Everyone with a disability, every group shunted out to the margins, every volunteer and carer; all of these people need to be heard. All of these people need help. All of these people need a bailout. And we can prove that it will make more sense than Nama.
Keith Duffy is an actor, singer and patron of Irish Autism Action