My wife and I have been fighting an uphill struggle since before Jacob was diagnosed. We were told by the early intervention team that they thought it was autism (we had known this long before) and that he was going to be transferred to another team and then… we were sort of left to our own devices.

A few occupational therapy and physio sessions and no real support beyond that. Not even a booklet on how to deal with it. Off you go, figure it out yourself, bye bye now. It’s the last thing any parent in this situation needs.

I don’t remember much from the earliest days of coming to terms with the situation.

It’s enough to try and internalise that my son had a disability that would be always with him. It’s been hard seeing his twin brother go off on one mainstream route while Jacob is on another.

What I remember from those days is deep sorrow and a sort of numbness. There was an irrational yet pervasive feeling of guilt, as if it was my fault. Of course, it’s nobody’s fault. But in that early fog it seemed logical that I should shoulder some responsibility or blame — I’m his dad, I’m supposed to protect him from everything.

Grief is a warped and bizarre thing that doesn’t always make sense in hindsight. There is plenty of hope still.

Any number of people on the autistic spectrum (we’re all on it somewhere, by the way) have gone on to success: Éamon de Valera, Dan Aykroyd, Daryl Hannah, to name a few, and far more go about their business every day.

I wouldn’t say I’m sad about it now. He is who he is and I love him as he is, even if I wish I could make it go away for his own sake. But I would say I’m angry.

Not at him, not at autism, but at the chronic inability of this republic to support those who need help. Jacob spent two years on a waiting list to be assessed and diagnosed — we had had him privately diagnosed long before that, but that’s not enough to access schools or services — and he has received nothing bar one physio session since.

It took forever and a day just for our complaint about him not being assessed to be processed and upheld, with the outcome being that that didn’t push him up the queue.

That’s not to say that the therapists in officialdom aren’t good or aren’t understanding. They’re drowning in a sea of referrals without the lifebuoy of resources that should be provided by the State which means parents are drowning along with them.

We have gone private for whatever we can, primarily occupational and speech therapy.

We have been incredibly fortunate on this front, with some particularly superb therapists who have made a real, tangible difference to him (a case in point is that he has occasionally used an Australian accent, copying his occupational therapist).

We have been so lucky also that he got a place in the Shine early learning unit in Carrigaline. Shine, for those who don’t know, is a charity that helps children with autism (and their parents) through intervention, advocacy, information, and a plethora of other services that we would be lost without.

We met them first to ask about benefit entitlements, and they not only went through the form with us but helped us fill it out.

It was an unexpected ray of light. When Jacob was offered a place in their early intervention unit we were overjoyed, and seeing how much they have helped him since he started there has been just wonderful.

He’s a different child to when he started, and he likes it so much that when he started back in September he ran in and gave one of the teachers a hug. If I was a king I’d knight them all and build them a whole new school.

I nearly wish he could stay there forever (incidentally, Shine’s new website, autismaware.ie, is a boon of information that’s of real help to parents, guardians, and carers).

Charities such as Shine are the ones stepping into the breach, to fill the gaps through what amount to sheer heroics.

Receiving a diagnosis that your child has autism is a desperately lonely time. Shine helped us immeasurably, even just by talking to us.

Honestly, I don’t know where we’d be had we not met them. The demand on their resources and knowledge must be endless.

Having fought endlessly up to this point, we are now fighting just to get him schooling. He isn’t suitable for a mainstream class, which is just a fact of life. But he can’t get a place in a school with an autism unit either.

There are 40 or so schools in Co Cork which have units and effectively zero places. We applied to one school, where his brother goes, only to learn it had had 24 applications — 24! — for 2019 and couldn’t take any of them.

It simply doesn’t have the space, and to be fair to the school it did consider our request to set up an additional unit; it can’t fit it on the grounds. Scale that across 40 schools (just primary schools) and you get a sense of the crisis that’s besetting our country’s children with disabilities.

Home tuition is an option but he needs a school setting where he can mix with other children. Being told by somebody in officialdom that we’re just “one of many” in the same situation is, frankly, bullshit.

We have applied to special schools with many unhappy results. There is such a dearth of special schools in Cork that some won’t have spaces for two or more years, and he would be well down a huge queue at the best of times.

In one infuriating and demoralising incident, one special school wouldn’t consider him because he turned five three days before its cut-off point.

There has been one chink of possible light in recent days, with a special school we hadn’t known about becoming a real possibility for him.

We won’t know until February, but for now it’s some real hopeful news that, while we’re not allowing to ignite entirely, we’re keeping tended and alight in the corner.

We don’t want to get burned if it doesn’t work out.

And if it doesn’t, well, I’m not sure where we go. Back to fighting in the trenches, no doubt, battling for what should be a given.