Nice timing, Ming, on the declaration of your autism

IF I didn’t know Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan had autism, I’d assume that his disclosing his health issues in public was a cunning ploy by a veteran politician to win sympathy and understanding among an overcrowded field of candidates in the upcoming EU elections.

The publicity that Ming’s World Autism Awareness Day tweet – acknowledging that he was autistic – garnered in the media, particularly the handsome spread in a leading Sunday newspaper, was advertising gold for the Roscommon MEP, who faces the electorate in a few weeks’ time amid stiff competition from Lisa Chambers, Barry Cowen, Hermann Kelly of the Irish Freedom Party and celebrity candidates including Maria Walsh MEP, Nina Carberry and Ciaran Mullooly in the MidlandsNorth-West constituency.

Autism is a complex condition with such a variety of symptoms that no two sufferers are the same, though there are certain commonalities. Autistic people usually share communication or social difficulties due to their brains being wired differently.

Deceit, wit, sarcasm, opportunism – the lubricants which most of us so-called neurotypical people use to grease the wheels of society – are usually absent from the blunt, honest and literalminded autism or neurodiverse community. In that sense, it seems likely that, despite his proven knack at commanding headlines, the convenient timing of Ming’s disclosure so close to the EU elections was no coincidence or that it wasn’t delivered solely in the interests of transparency.

The Independent MEP, who entered politics on a legalising-cannabis platform and came to fame on winning a Dáil seat in the 2011 general election, is not the first public figure to admit to having autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or even to receiving a diagnosis quite late in the day. Like him, many admit

Diagnosis: Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan to suspecting something was amiss all their lives and also to relief at the diagnosis. They finally have an explanation for why tasks that seem so simple for most people cause them such frustration, or why they can’t tolerate loud noises or bright lights that others don’t seem to notice, or why they were loners at school while everyone else went around in packs. The MEP, who got the news in February, put it eloquently when he said that the diagnosis was ‘like knowing my location on a sat nav’, adding: I always knew where I wanted to go. Now I know my starting point, the journey is so much easier to plot.’ Revelations from the likes of Ming Flanagan help remove the stigma about autism and enhance public understanding. The MEP has also highlighted the HSE’s long waiting lists for an autism assessment and how people like him, who have the funds, and indeed his middle daughter, who also suffers from the condition, must go privately.

Yet the parade of high achievers, from Elon Musk to Greta Thunberg, with autism can also be a double-edged sword, particularly when a climate of funding shortages for essential therapies, interventions and assessments prevails, as in this country.

For, to put it bluntly, an affliction like autism doesn’t appear too serious at all if it didn’t stop Ming succeeding in the ruthless field of politics, despite his patchy education and career background and his not being taken seriously in the early days. Nor does it appear to have held back Anthony Hopkins’s rise to the top in cutthroat Hollywood.

Like many autistic people, the MEP has auditory processing difficulties. He has suffered from poor concentration, anxiety and depression. But his challenges haven’t stopped the uncompromising politician getting married, raising a family of three daughters and maintaining a circle of friends, not to mention the thousands he inspired to vote for him in a series of elections.

AMONG a sceptical public, dubious about the explosion of numbers suffering from autism and conditions that often coexist with it such as ADHD and dyspraxia, the success of these prominent people in their careers and in life can be powerful argument against more taxpayer support.

For it’s easy to forget that for every Ming Flanagan at, evidently, the so-called ‘high-functioning’ end of the autism spectrum, there are God knows how many people living in institutions or coping in special schools with little potential and even less prospect of living independently or having friends.

These are the children who can’t wait until middle age to have their hunch that they were out of sync with the world confirmed, but whose parents suspected from the get-go that something was wrong when they failed to crawl or reach their milestones.

These are the people at autism’s other extreme, whose parents are desperate for therapies to give them a chance in life and who tragically often don’t receive them. The vast chasm between their abilities and those of Musk or indeed Ming Flanagan makes the diagnosis of autism somewhat meaningless.

At the very least it calls for a return to the days when Asperger’s syndrome described highfunctioning autism, differentiating it from more severe forms of the condition and identifying who, when funds are limited, needs State support the most.

Ming Flanagan’s accusation in the Sunday Independent against the Government for treating an autism diagnosis as a luxury, not an essential service, is spot on. The irony is that his using autism as a catch-all term that ignores the profound differences in its effects exacerbates the problem.