Parents face weekend without their children

A father and mother have been left "devastated" after health authorities sought to place their children in State care. Carl O'Brien reports

Padraig O'Hara's voice was suffused with anger and disbelief as he recounted last night's events at his home in Kells, Co Meath which resulted in his children being placed in State care.

"We are completely devastated," he said. "We love our children to bits, we never hurt them in our lives. It can be tough looking after them, we realise they can be a danger to themselves, but we have had no support. And now we are facing into a weekend without our children. I can't believe this is happening."

The O'Haras fight for services for their children has been a long and exhausting one. Padraig, a medical products salesman, and his wife Mary, a former nurse, have given up their jobs to look after their five children .

Their eldest son Fionn (16) goes to a regular school, but suffers from dyslexia and depression. The second and third boys, Oisín (13), Blaine (9), have been diagnosed with autism and go to school in Blanchardstown, one to primary and the other to secondary. The two youngest boys, Seadna (5) and Cionnaola (4), both have severe autism. Neither can dress or feed himself and they are not toilet-trained. The younger of the two cannot speak.

The four autistic children rarely sleep properly. Combined with the boys' behavioural problems, both parents say they are forced to survive on around three hours' sleep each night.

The family is currently surviving on social welfare and says this is a major struggle because all the children are on special diets.

Against this backdrop, the family says it has been forced to fight for basic services for their children and to seek help in the UK in assessing the needs of their children.

Last year, the family says, the local health board withdrew funding for care assistants for the two youngest boys. The O'Haras say they only recently got the funding back.

The Health Service Executive (North Eastern Area) declined to comment on the case except to say that under the Childcare Act it had an obligation to ensure the safety and welfare of children.

In recent months the O'Haras say they have been paying for therapies for their children in the absence of the appropriate services identified by UK professionals.

Mr O'Hara insisted that while his children have been in foster care on a respite basis before, the health board was last night acting against their wishes and was "penalising" them for speaking to the media about their battle for services.

"We have been organising and paying for therapies ourselves for the children, we are travelling hundreds of miles every week. Now, after they've got a sniff about how difficult our situation is, they're rapping us across the knuckles. I feel we're being punished for speaking out," said Mr O'Hara