I’LL SELL OUR HOME TO GET MY SON AN EDUCATION
That’s the startling admission of Andrew Geary, whose son Calum needs a sign language interpreter to get through school – a provision which he believes will only cost the State €40,000 over seven years
LIKE most children, Donnacha Geary was excited, if a little nervous, at starting secondary school this year. He joined his two older brothers, Barry and Matthew, at St Colman’s College in Fermoy, a well-regarded school that’s about a ten-minute drive from their home in Ballyhooly, north Cork.
Less than two months into his first school term, his parents, Helen and Andrew, are delighted at how well the 12-year-old has settled in and how much he loves it. Yet, amid the Geary family’s joy and relief at another one of their sons reaching such an important milestone, there is also a certain amount of unavoidable pain and anger.
For as Donnacha was trying on new school uniforms and covering his textbooks this summer, his twin brother Calum was looking on, perhaps more conscious than ever of the widening gap between the lives they now lead.
Calum didn’t start secondary school this year, he’s just gone into sixth class after staying back. Every bit as clever as his brother, he has an above average IQ and is eager to learn but he is also profoundly deaf and completely reliant on all of his school lessons being signed out to him.
But he has only had a qualified Irish Sign Language (ISL) interpreter for two out of the last six years of his schooling — a situation that his family believe has caused him to fall behind.
‘He’s years behind where he should be and where his IQ tells us he should be,’ says Andrew. ‘He did a raft of tests a couple of years ago and his IQ is well above average.
‘His teachers were learning ISL at their own expense’
But despite huge efforts from himself, my wife and his teachers, his reading ability is well below where it should be.’
He is due to start secondary school next year, a community college in Cork city that takes in about six deaf children each year, and as yet there is no guarantee, or even plan being put in place, to provide him with a qualified ISL teacher or interpreter.
There is a weary desperation in Andrew’s voice as he explains the complexities of the battle his family have been fighting for the last six years — a battle he now plans to take to the High Court, even if it means selling his house to pay for their case.
A garda sergeant who trains new recruits in Templemore, he is already a familiar face and voice to many after his various appearances on TV and radio, including a powerful slot on The Late Late Show back in May, when he went on with his two youngest sons to try and fully explain their plight.
Through an interpreter, Calum deftly explained how tough it can feel at times being a deaf person living in a hearing world.
‘At the moment there’s so many barriers, so many things in the way, that I don’t think I can get there as easily,’ he signed. ‘In life I’ll always face challenges and barriers. I’ll always have to fight for the interpreter and because I have to fight for one it’ll leave me behind.
‘Sign language isn’t everywhere, people say things in English very quickly but in sign language they’re signing and speaking and pieces are missing. I always [feel lonely].’
Calum was born with cochlear nerve aplasia, which means he is missing all of the nerves between each ear and the brain, as well as his balance nerves. It’s a condition that affects fewer than 1,000 people around the world.
I first met the family in June 2012 at their home in Cork, a few months after Calum was fitted with auditory brainstem implants (ABI), an operation where 21 electrodes are placed at the top of the brain stem to create electrical impulses representing sound.
The complicated and then relatively new surgery, took seven hours at Manchester University Hospital, and at first was thought to have been successful. The Gearys knew through their own research — and had been repeatedly warned — that ABI is not a miracle cure for deafness and that their son would not wake up suddenly able to hear.
‘It’s not all fixed with the flick of a switch,’ Helen explained. ‘It’s going to take extreme patience and a lot of training... What we have to work towards with this device is training Calum to recognise environmental sounds, like a door banging or a car passing. That will help him to learn how to lip read so that, one day, he can have conversations with hearing people who do not have sign language.’ Unfortunately they never got that far. ‘They thought it [the ABI] was successful,’ Andrew explains. ‘It just showed Calum’s intelligence really, he knew how to give the signals and read people’s faces but they did a double blind test and it proved it wasn’t working.’ Calum is one of a handful of deaf people in Ireland who cannot benefit from any kind of hearing aid technology. When he was four his parents decided to send him to St Columba’s National School in Douglas, Cork, which is about 80km away from their home. ‘It has a deaf unit and we felt he needed to have deaf kids around him that can sign,’ says Andrew. ‘Helen believes it was the right decision because he doesn’t feel so different there. He has the hearing world at home and the deaf world in school.’ For the first few years
Andrew thought Calum was getting a similar education to his brother, just that it was all being done through sign language. But it then became apparent to the Gearys that he was falling behind Donnacha in his schoolwork.
Their fears were confirmed, Andrew says, when in 2015 he read the book Raising and Educating a Deaf Child by Dr Marc Marschark, an American professor and adviser to Irish education authorities.
‘He’s a world expert who came here in 2007 or 2008 to examine our education system,’ Andrew explains. ‘It broke my heart — up until that point I thought Calum was getting full access to the curriculum.’
Dr Marschark’s book says that to learn any language, whether signed or spoken, children must have exposure to the highest quality and quantity of language ‘via meaningful interactions with others who are already capable users of the language’.
And although Andrew believes the teachers in Calum’s school are ‘absolutely brilliant,’ he also knows most of them are not fully qualified in ISL.
‘They don’t need any qualification in ISL to teach in schools of the deaf,’ he explains. ‘There’s no prerequisite in the Department of
Education’s guidelines. So they have learned sign language the same as I have, by going to courses on their own time.’
The issue with this, he says, is the teachers who did not study ISL full time in college, are not fluent enough to fully interpret every school subject to students like Calum. So he has fallen behind.
‘We’re asking for teachers [for those reliant on ISL like Calum] to be qualified in the same way other language teachers are,’ says Andrew. ‘To a standard of a level eight degree. Despite the brilliant efforts these teachers have made, they’re going off and learning in their own time, at their own expense.’
After an intense campaign by the Geary family, Calum was eventually assigned a qualified ISL interpreter, but she only stayed in the role for two years.
‘She was paid so poorly and had no holiday or maternity benefits, she had to leave,’ Andrew explains. ‘But while she was there, we saw how brilliantly it worked.
‘He was finally fully getting everything that was going on in the classroom. It was a speck of light, and that’s why we’re so driven, we know how good it can be.’
They want a fully qualified ISL teacher or interpreter to be assigned to Calum as quickly as possible. So far their pleas are unanswered and they’ve no idea if one will be made available when he starts secondary next year.
What makes this situation even more infuriating is that as of 2017, Calum is legally entitled to have access to such an interpreter during his education.
The Irish Sign Language Act 2017 established ISL, alongside Irish and English, as an official language. There is now a statutory duty on all public bodies to provide free interpretation of all statutory entitlements and services.
However, an unpublished report by the National Disability Authority that was commissioned by Minister of State for Disabilities, Anne Rabbitte, and which was leaked to a newspaper last weekend, has found that the majority of State bodies are either not aware of the ISL Act, or are not aware of their responsibilities under the Act. Perhaps even more damning, 83 public bodies, including An Garda Síochána and the Office of the President have still not responded to the survey.
In the Dáil last week, Minister Rabbitte said she had ordered the report to assess the implementation of the ISL Act and hit out at the poor response. ‘I think it is remissible of the departments to be so slow,’ she said, adding that public bodies ‘should know better’ and ‘should know the value of allowing people the opportunity to be the very best that they can be, to allow people to perform their roles and responsibilities, and to integrate with services, integrate with their peers, but also to recognise that ISL is a form of communication and it’s their first language’.
On the same day in the Dáil Fianna Fáil TD Pádraig O’Sullivan raised Calum Geary’s case, saying it is ‘quite apparent that we the State have failed and are continuing to fail these families.’
‘People are being lost in the system and lost through the cracks... These children have constitutional rights, and the State has an obligation to provide appropriately trained personnel to impart knowledge and teach these wonderful children.’
He also raised the subject of pay and conditions for ISL-trained interpreters, about how even though they have a four-year degree from either Trinity College or DCU, they are paid the equivalent of a special needs assistant.
‘This is no way to detract from the excellent work that our SNAs do on a daily basis,’ he said.
Indeed, Andrew Geary points out that the monetary difference between providing an SNA and a fully trained ISL interpreter is not that much. ‘There are SNAs in Calum’s school,’ he says. ‘But that’s not what he needs, he needs a fully trained interpreter/teacher. An SNA’s salary begins at about €24,500 while sign language graduates, be it interpreters or teachers, are happy to begin at around €28,5000, it’s a difference of €4,000.
‘And that salary has already been signed off in the public service — in the Citizens Information Board there are now interpreters working for the State whose salary begins at about €28,500.
‘So Calum’s education based on an SNA, which is available to him, against what he really needs — a sign language interpreter/teacher — is only going to cost the State maybe €40,000 over the next six to seven years.
‘Calum is the 1% of the 1%, there are only around 100 like him across the island. And because ISL is his only language, without an interpreter in his classroom, he cannot fully access his education, which is his constitutional right.’
A Department of Education spokesperson said: The Department does not comment on individual cases. Planning is underway on the implementation of the provisions of the ISL Act in consultation with the National Council for Special Education. This includes the development of the formal schemes required under the Act and any adaptations to current education provision and related supports that may be required in that context.’
Andrew is now preparing to go to the High Court to fight for an ISL interpreter to be provided. It’s a move that may force the Gearys to sell their family home in order to fund their legal challenge.
‘I’ve been told that the big mistake I’ve made was not going into the High Court six years ago,’ he says. ‘There’s a certain amount of guilt that I didn’t. I invested myself in our democracy and our system, but now I feel I should have gone straight to the High Court instead of wasting all this time.
‘There’s been a bit of movement in the Dáil in recent weeks, but I’ve no doubt it’s because I’ve mentioned my intention to go to the High Court. Here’s this ordinary family, in the middle of nowhere, having to risk everything to get their son an education.’
Andrew and his wife Helen are trying to ‘insulate’ the twins from the issues the family is dealing with
‘I should have gone straight to the High Court’ ‘Calum is a brilliant communicator’
as much as possible. The situation, however, does affect their relationship to a certain degree.
‘Calum can see the books Donnacha is reading and that does cause him angst,’ says Andrew. ‘Donnacha has finished reading Lord of the Rings, while Caulm is reading Roald Dahl. But he has to concentrate on his own ability. They sign to each other fluently and they fight like cats and dogs but they love each other to bits, they’re like any other brothers.
‘We all sign at home and Calum is a brilliant communicator, he loves talking. He baked a cake last week and then put the whole lot of us around the table. Everyone of us had to tell a story in sign language. That’s what he loves.’
Future careers Calum is interested in so far include designing cars, cheffing or becoming an architect. But before he can pursue any of those, Andrew says he needs people with the full vocabulary to help him learn the full school curriculum.
‘ISL is a full langage. It’s like going to France on holidays and you feel absolutely amazing when you speak your French to someone, but you don’t realise the person speaking back to you is after bringing their level of French down to your level. That’s what happens when I sign with a deaf person, they bring their level down to mine.’
The discrepancy in the twins’ education, naturally, has caused some difficult moments. ‘Calum was upset when he saw Donnacha getting his new uniform and books and heading off,’ admits Andrew. ‘But he’s OK about it now.’
The real problem is that Calum is very aware he’s missing out, and unless he gets access to the education he needs now, he may never get the chance to catch up.
‘He feels he’s behind,’ says Andrew. ‘He knows he has more potential within himself. He can get so frustrated, his teachers say it all the time, that he’s so hard on himself. None of this is through any fault of his own.’