A Different Frequency
The manager of the Point Depot tells Victoria Mary Clarke about life with his autistic daughter
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=45&si=641521&issue_id=6415
Cormac Rennick is a man to befriend. As the manager of Dublin's Point Depot, he can get your kids backstage for Westlife. The Stones, Bowie, Michael Flatley, the Spice Girls whoever takes your fancy, Cormac could get you in there. One imagines him living in a sexy penthouse in Ringsend, driving a Ferrari, hanging out with his VIP mates in their private jets.
So meeting him and his wife Sarah at their Blanchardstown home seems somehow inappropriate. But this is his morning off and this is where he lives. From the outside, it's a perfectly normal life, with two kids in a suburban semi. But all is not as it seems. Cormac and Sarah have the requisite two kids Conor, 7, and Catherine, 5 but Catherine is autistic and because of this, their life is far from normal. I am invited to say hello to Catherine, but she doesn't want to talk to me. She is a delicate, pretty child who flinches when I approach and clutches her ear, as if in pain.
"Say hello, Catherine," Cormac says, but she looks frightened, looks away. The door must be left open as I chat with Cormac and Sarah in their kitchen, because Catherine likes doors to be open, but she's hypersensitive to noise. It's as though she can hear frequencies that we can't.
She has just started in a new school specifically for autistic children. It was set up by Cormac himself, the result of years of campaigning for a proper education for his child and other similar children in the Dublin area. Cormac has plenty of experience with getting things done. He's been in charge of the Point Depot for seven years now and is obviously not someone to sit around waiting for things to happen all by themselves.
His wife, Sarah, who was his deputy manager at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford, offers me tea. She is warm, friendly and articulate. Cormac, it is explained, has organised a concert, Stars of the Christmas Carol, on November 26 at the National Concert Hall, to raise money for PACT, Parents of Autistic Children Together. The concert also benefits the Irish Autism Alliance, which Cormac set up as an umbrella organisation, to get all the other ones listened to. I ask him if he's something of a politician.
"Something like that. But I turned down the chance to be in politics 20 years ago. I don't think I could ever toe the party line."
Catherine sneaks in and takes a bag of sweets. Cormac stops her. "Come back! You can't have the whole packet. Do you think I'm silly? Say thank you."
Catherine says thank you, after some prompting.
"Entertainment is my first love, anyway," he continues. "I didn't set out to be a crusader. All I'm trying to do is to give Catherine the chance to be as good as she can be."
What do you want for Catherine, I ask.
"Children with autism need to have rights in legislation. And that should not be dependent on the current economic climate. They have a right to education as citizens of this country. And the only way that parents have been able to compel the Government to respond is by taking constitutional challenges. You are talking three-year court battles just to get the basic rights established, which is untenable."
Sarah shows me a book which points to links between autism and diet. Catherine has been discovered to be severely affected by gluten and dairy products, and these having been removed from her diet, she now sleeps at night, which Sarah says is a godsend.
"We had no sleep at all, before we took Catherine off milk. When I look back at that, I don't know how we functioned," she says.
"With a lot of kids," Sarah explains, "autism seems to kick in around the age of two. So they follow a normal developmental curve until they are two. The evidence points to some sort of genetic predisposition to autism. It seems to be prevalent in families with a history of allergies, asthma, bowel disorders and things like that. But there is also an environmental trigger. They may get their first viral infection, their first dose of antibiotics, the MMR inoculation. There has been a lot of research into the links between the MMR and autism."
As parents, I ask, what was it like to discover
Catherine wasautistic.
"I suspected it for a long time," Sarah says. "When Catherine was 16 months old, I walked into the room one day and called her name, and she didn't respond to me. After that, I would sit in front of her and she wouldn't make eye contact with me. On her first birthday, she had walked downstairs in her party frock, looked at her aunt and said, 'Clever!' Within months, she'd stopped communicating. It took nine months to get a diagnosis. And we had that time to prepare ourselves."
How has it affected your work running the Point, I ask.
"It has affected every area of our lives," says Cormac. "But it's not an option not to do my job properly. And it's not an option not to fight for Catherine's rights. Because if I don't, who else will?"
'Stars of the Christmas Carol', in aid of PACT and the Irish Autism Alliance, National Concert Hall, November 26. Line-up includes Rebecca Storm, Brendan O'Carroll, the Vards; compere Marty Whelan.
