Peter CostelloThe recent attacks on young men with intellectual disabilities in Cork and in Dublin, have received great deal of media attention, and rightly so. But the true nature of what “learning disabilities means” often escapes them. Ruth Chipperfield will enlighten them.
This is truly the story of an exceptional man, her brother Gordon Cochran, exceptional in that to try and lead a normal life he has to work hard to overcome the disadvantages of his learning disabilities. He is barely able to speak, and yet he travels round by bus and by train, meets people and makes friends.
Equipped with a briefcase and The Irish Times, he would travel round the city, convinced that, like his father, he was a businessman with a schedule to keep. But on the buses and the train, by the executives of those often impersonal seeming organisations, he was greeted and cared for and helped on his way.
But this book is above all the story of Gordon and his family. It is a truly heroic story, of courage in what were often adverse conditions, but also a story of what human relations can achieve. This is in its way an important book which ought to be widely read, and not just by those in the caring professions.
Policy makers talk about care in the community. But sometimes the community – that is you and me – as we go about our individual lives – have little time to be bothered. If care in the community is to mean anything, if such ugly episodes as those recently reported are to be avoided, care in the community has to mean care by everyone for everyone else. This story illustrates this so well, one can only hope it achieves wide readership, for it is a very human and a very lovely story, told with love and with an eye on the funny side of things as well. Faith too, drawn from the Bible and fervent hymn singing, played a large role too in the family life.
We all have a model of an ideal family life; often this is hard to follow. For exceptional people, people like Gordon, nature makes its own rules and we have to help them to live with that and to respect them for what they are. And help them to achieve what they can achieve, to live as well as they can.
Gordon is now retired; he is after all in his 60s. But nevertheless, his life echoes the psalmist’s words, familiar from the little Gospel Hall in Fairview, the family once attended: “Though the Lord is on high he looks upon the lowly. The Lord will fulfil his purpose for me.”