Platform: I set up kids’ therapy centre to help my son

When Conor was about to start school, people started saying he'd need support in the classroom. We brought him to a local educational psychologist and she said he had a few red flags, and that he'd need an occupational therapist to assess his needs. I'd never heard of an occupational therapist before.

Around the same time, we had fundraised to have a bone-anchored hearing aid fitted and have Conor's ear canal reconstructed in Los Angeles. I asked the doctor there if he knew of anywhere that did occupational therapy assessments and he sent us to this place called Can Do Kids. It was a big, colourful playcentre with ball pools and swings. Conor loved it there.

We got Conor's occupational therapy assessment there and they said he has dyspraxia, now more often called Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), which affects handwriting, coordination and fine motor skills. Things that require rote memory, like times tables, are also very hard. We came back to Ireland looking for our version of Can Do Kids.

We discovered that, in Ireland, one child in four has special educational needs. That means anything from dyspraxia to hearing or vision impairment, Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, or any kind of neurodiversity.

We found out that there are 45,000 children on waiting lists for speech and occupational therapy in Ireland. That's years of a wait; a lifetime for a child.

Eventually, we found a private clinic that cost €120 per hour. They said Conor would need to come twice a week for four months to start. It was costing more than our mortgage, and Conor didn't like it because it wasn't like the colourful place in America. Out of frustration, we decided to fundraise and open our own occupational therapy centre. We set up Sensational Kids as a registered charity and, to subsidise the cost of the therapy services, we have an online toy shop and we run training workshops for parents and clinicians. All the profits are ploughed into Sensational Kids.

Since 2008, we have supported over 7,000 children and saved families €1.5m in therapy fees. We now offer speech therapy, psychological and educational assessments, reading assistance and play therapy.

In the first 10 years, children were coming from all over the country to Kildare. Our aim was that the services should be both affordable and accessible, so we needed a Sensational Kids in every province.

Two years ago, we got help from the Dormant Accounts Fund to open our second centre, in Clonakilty, Co Cork, and in September 2019, with funding from The Community Foundation for Ireland and The Ireland Funds, we opened in Claremorris, Co Mayo.

In early March, we were gifted a centre in Clones, making Monaghan our Ulster branch. During lockdown we were awarded the Growth Fund from Rethink Ireland. That will fund us for three years to scale up our senior management team while we grow. I've had to let go a bit, but it's been a privilege to start all this.

Conor is 19 now and in his second year studying marketing in Maynooth. He is proof of the benefit of early intervention. Without it, his life could have been very different.

People ask if I feel angry that we're taking the burden off the State, but that doesn't bother me.

The goal is to help 30,000 children over the next 10 years and make a transformational difference to the waiting lists. That would really change things for children in Ireland.