History

The Hope Project was designed to reach, inform, assist and motivate parents to ensure that their disabled children receive appropriate help and receive it as early as possible, thereby giving them a much greater chance of a healthy, happy life. We find that our work especially involved families caring for someone with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

The Hope Project also seeks to inform government and ensure that government departments provide all the services to which these persons have a need and therefore a right.

We in the Hope Project acknowledge the fine and necessary work being done by other groups. All of us belong to at least one other such group and encourage parents to join and form groups, especially local groups, for effective local action and personal support. We would like to especially acknowledge the contribution of AiA (Allergy Induced Autism) who are contributors to this resource book and encourage readers to become members and receive their cutting edge newsletter, and the Cork Association for Autism for the help we have received.

Last year a well known professor of psychology who specialises in autism said that "If AiA is right (that ASD are driven by an 'autistic biology') all the books on autism will have to be rewritten". It is time for the professionals to start rewriting. In the interim, parents have put together this collection. We hope it will be useful to people within the Autistic Spectrum in Ireland, their families and those who serve them.

We do not claim to be medical, educational, legal, etc., experts. We are experts in our own individual children. Accumulating the information that can help a child can take a long time. Time is what the child with ASD does not have. With this website, we hope to save irreplaceable time. We recognise the value of and demand for shared parental experience. We offer no more than this. Please send us more information for future updating and for The Hope Project Newsletter which will be launched very soon.

We encourage parents to photocopy and distribute material mentioned in the resource page to others. We caution all parents to seek professional help and guidance from experts familiar with ASD biology in general and their child's biology in particular.