Hearing children often have to take on huge tasks to help parents and siblings, reports Sheila Wayman
WHEN AMANDA Dunne was a young child, she would often pray at bedtime that she would be deaf when she woke up in the morning.
"Up to about the age of 12, I really wanted to be deaf like everyone else," she says. Her parents, Brenda and Eugene, are deaf, as is her only sibling, Darren.
From the day she was born, Dunne was learning to communicate with her immediate family through Irish Sign Language (ISL).
Having hearing grandparents helped her to pick up spoken English, although she was referred to a speech therapist when she started school: "They noticed I was not pronouncing things the right way." But she says that not all hearing children of deaf parents would have that problem.
Growing up in Rialto, Dublin, she does not believe she had a radically different childhood from her friends.
"The only thing I would have noticed was that my parents had a lot more difficulties with everyday things.
"Not through any fault of their own, but because of the attitude of the wider community."
She found it hurtful that people would presume her parents were stupid.
"It can be upsetting for a kid if people are disrespectful to your parents and if you see your parents being treated as different. It still happens today," says Dunne (26) who has just qualified as a professional ISL interpreter after a two-year course at Trinity College.
As the only hearing member of the family, she was inevitably called on as a child to interpret using ISL for her parents, sometimes in far from appropriate circumstances.
It was not that her parents wanted her to do it, but often there was no choice.
At school in Loreto Crumlin, she turned this to her advantage at parent-teacher meetings.
"When the teacher said 'Amanda is not being very good', I'd say: 'She says I'm great.' They copped on to that soon enough."
As an adult, it can still be difficult. At the end of last year, her father had a heart attack at home, and was admitted to hospital for a week.
"I was pulled in to interpret for him," she says, and the medical staff did not seem to consider for a moment that it might not be appropriate to use his daughter, who was going through her own emotions.
"I was all over the place. I never thought to ask for an interpreter," she says.
But she finds it "really infuriating" that hospitals will provide interpreters of foreign languages, but are very reluctant to pay for ISL interpreters. If a deaf person asks for an interpreter, she says, the attitude is "they are Irish, can't they write it down?"
Willy White, a hearing son of two deaf parents, says he and his five siblings had to communicate on their parents' behalf when growing up in Tralee, Co Kerry, more than 30 years ago. At that time there were no ISL interpreters around.
"As a child you took on responsibility at a very early age. It was a burden you are socially and linguistically not equipped to carry," says White, who is an ISL interpreter.
He set up the Kerry Deaf Resource Centre in 1999 when, despite the legislative improvements for the deaf community through the Equal Status Act and Disability Act, there was very little happening on the ground.
"I wanted to change that," he says.
White believes there is still a lack of awareness of the obligation to provide support for deaf people.
He was talking to a neurosurgeon recently who thought it was "brilliant" that the seven-year-old child of a deaf patient was able to come in and interpret through ISL.
"You can't have a seven-year-old child interpreting at a neurosurgical appointment," says White. "And this is an intelligent guy. There is a naivety out there in many ways."
• www.kerrydeaf.com