From the
Irish Times. Pictured is a Braille plaque on the bench.
A bench commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the National Braille Production Centre was unveiled at a ceremony in Dublin yesterday.
The bench, designed by Robert Ballagh and inscribed in Braille and in text with the Seamus Heaney poem Seeing the Sky, is located in the gardens of St Joseph’s Centre for the Visually Impaired in Drumcondra. The National Braille Production Centre, which last year produced 2,800 transcriptions of books into Braille for 492 students yesterday also launched Irish and maths text books in a computerised audio playback format.
It is the first time all primary and second-level Irish and maths textbooks will be available to visually impaired students in mainstream schools across the country. Speaking at the event, Minister for Education Mary Coughlan said “€1 billion of the €9.5 billion spent on education is spent on special needs and rightly so”.
The Minister said she hoped to “continue to work on the development of education for all children over the next two years, but especially for special needs children”.
Chief executive of the centre Brian Allen said, “St Joseph’s was hidden from view for most of its life, but now we want to show the world the extraordinary work that goes on here and the people who fight against all the odds”.
Mr Allen said that part of the unit was a converted onion shed and said “only half of our students can come through the front door as the building isn’t designed for them”.
He said, “We are having to do more and more with less and less” but it was the “school’s vision to become national centre with regional outreach services”.
Heaney who read his poem At the Wellhead, said he had written it about a childhood neighbour, Rosie Keenan, who was blind.
Heaney said “the sense of presence and beauty of a blind person in my first community was part of my making a space for art”.
Describing the bench, Heaney said “the cedar of Lebanon and granite represents the sweetness and strength that comes through in the work done here”.
From the Irish Times. Pictured is a Braille plaque on the bench.
