'We know how important joy is when you're in a difficult situation.'

I am a children’s writer obviously, for nine to 12 year olds. So they're fairly chunky novels, and that means I spend an awful lot of my time at home writing and, as we all know, it’s quite isolating to be a writer, unless you have Children's Books Ireland available to you. So obviously I went to Children's Books Ireland because it is basically the home of a fantastic community in this country like no other. My English counterparts will always tell me they're seriously jealous of what we have here as part of the community in Ireland, and that is down, truly, to Children's Books Ireland, keeping us together. They're the hope. And so I'm always on the lookout for what opportunities there are, what they're working on there because they communicate these things so well. 

And I came across something, it was coming up to summer, and they were on the lookout for somebody who would join them over that summer of 2024/2025 for the Reads and Rhymes Together programme ad they were looking for somebody who would become a Champion of Reading and to inspire basically a culture of reading within a children's hospital environment through Children's Health Ireland. So initially, I mean that sounded not unlike what we do, which is our workshops, our creativity workshops, and meetings and so forth. But I knew instantly I could tick those boxes, but I had to flashback to my own experience with my own child, who was in hospital when they were very, very young. So my eyes were wide open to this opportunity. I knew what this would mean. And many of you have known or had children in hospital, you know what we're talking about here. It's a very, an incredibly difficult environment with huge challenges. So there was massive nerves and apprehension on my part, and that's why I took this job, because I knew the value it could bring despite all of that. 

I have been CHI's Champion of Reading for around two years now. I think I've calculated I've knocked on 100 doors over the past couple of years. I don't know what will face me each and every single time, and I have to brace myself, but it is the most incredibly rewarding place to be and job to do, because we've all heard the talk, you know, the positive side of it. We've all heard it. We all know it. We know how important joy is when you're in a difficult situation. But I actually witnessed it like it could not actually put it into words.

But I knocked on a door. I went in and it was a 14 month old boy who was just post-op, he was in great distress, and it had been an emergency operation. So there's a lot of trauma in that room, and I felt it the second I opened that door. And the first thing you do when you open the door in this job that I do is you have to gauge what approach works best. Sometimes they need, literally, a clown to come in and liven things up, but other times it needs a loving, gentle approach. And you're not just talking about how the child is going to greet you or meet you. It's the parents, it’s the whole family. In this case, it was one really tough moment not just for me, because they were looking at me as if saying, I don't know if this is the right time, and I'm looking at them saying I don't know if it’s the right time because its so soon after post-op. I call this story the boy on the belly. Dad was lying flat on the bed and kept his child lying flat on his belly and it was the only place where he could get some little comfort. The child was visibly distressed. Mum was literally pacing, it couldn't have got any worse, to be honest, they were desperate to see a little snippet of their normal child in that room, but at that moment, that child was nowhere near them. 

So we took a gamble, and we went for it and I read some nursery rhymes and showed the book to the child, and there was this tiny little smile, and Dad spotted it and quickly called mum ‘look look he’s smiling’ and mum came over. It was very inspiring. Me looking down, mum staring and the child then child chuckled, it was probably my singing but that chuckle! It was like, in the room, that somebody opened the window, the relief those parents felt for that child, that they were getting their child back. There was hope there, and that's the word....and a book did that, just one page in a book did that. I will never forget that experience. But I repeated that another 19 times, each and every single visit did that to me. I have a list. I have a thick list of experiences I have there. So yes, this is why I took on this opportunity and I have no doubt this will probably be the best opportunity of my career, definitely.