President and Members of the Irish-US Alumni, Distinguished Guests, Fellow Speakers, Ladies and Gentlemen: We must never

forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them. These are the words of John F. Kennedy, one of the United States best loved Presidents and quite naturally an Irish-American. I believe that they sum up what young Irish leadership is all about and what I know each of us here this morning wants it to remain. I am deeply honoured to have been invited here to speak to you this morning to speak to you about this topical subject while I do not for a moment consider myself to be an IrishLeader I do hope to introduce you to some projects I am lucky enough to be working on which demonstrate leadership by all involved. I am particularly grateful to speak here today as a young Irish person. All too often my generation gets dismissed as apathetic and self-obsessed but I know from working on the ground that this could not be further from the truth. Young people all across Ireland are answering Kennedy's call for action every single day. This is especially true in the areas of mental health, disability and social inclusion. Enterprise is being shown daily in our work to build that inclusive Ireland we hear so much about and also in young people's efforts to ensure that the public are enlightened about such topics. Openand honest discussion around topics such as mental health can only be helpful and healthy. I would like to particularly acknowledge the work of the US Embassy, Dublin in providing young people with the platform to raise issues of concern and to further socialentrepreneurial projects. This has been achieved through the establishment of the 50th US Embassy Youth Council here in Ireland, last December. I am proud to have been appointed a member of this body and look forward to working with all involved in helping to address issues faced by young people in both Ireland and the United States. These issues include high youth unemployment, the pressures of a prevailing drugs culture and, as I have already mentioned, the great issue of our generation mental health problems often fuelled by social, economic and cultural issues. However, despite having many challenging issues before us, we are not despondent or resigned but rather looking for solutions and the opportunity to implement them. It is against the backdrop of youth social enterprise that I myself got involved in my first major national initiative, AspergersAdvice.org, This is an online information centre and social hub for those affected by Aspergers Syndrome be they people with the condition, their family and friends or professional working with the condition. Put simply, Aspergers Syndrome is a condition on the autistic spectrum where those affected usually have average or above average intelligence but struggle with day to day social, communication and life skills. They may also have additional learning difficulties such as dyslexia, dyspraxia or ADHD. While the condition presents many lifelong challenges and indeed many people with the condition will never live independently, it has gifted to the world such geniuses as Albert Einstein and James Joyce and also gaveu s a certain Irish-American by the name of Eamonn De Valera. I myself am all too aware of the struggle life presents to people with Aspergers because, like approximately 15,000 others in the country, I have Aspergers. I was very fortunate to benefit from early intervention and this intervention enabled me to tackle some key social

and educational challenges early in life. Today I am grateful to be able to live a full and meaningful life, and while the condition will always form part of me I am determined that it will not define me. The reason I set up AspergersAdvice.org was to begin to give something back to those facing the same problems as myself and had experienced the same challenges and my family and I. I considered a number of ways I could do this and even thought about writing a book but it was while researching the condition one night online I decided that a website was how I could help to make a difference. Although I found a lot of websites referring to the condition there seemed to be a lack of engaging content sure, there was reams of medical information and indeed websites which took a positively grim there were none offering innteractive and jargon-free information. I know from my own parents that the best support you can receive when going through the dark and difficult days of diagnosis and early schooling is knowing that there is someone else who has been through the process and has come out the other side. I decided to create AspergersAdvice.org as a website which would let those human stories shine through and allow these experiences to shape discussion. I must admit however, that I have a problem or perhaps a gift in always thinking big and over the following months I began to increase the scale of the idea. It was to include jargon-free information so that parents did not have to spend hours poring over lengthy medical journals and we would try to take some small step to combat the isolation all too often felt by those affected by the condition. We aim to do this through providing a secure online forum where our members can share experiences and ideas. I also wanted the website to be user-led. All too often families affected by disability are told what services they can have and how they are to receive them. On AspergersAdvice.org our users tell us their needs and views and we use this to govern what projects and initiatives we pursue. While the website itself is still in its early days, I am delighted to say that we now welcome hundreds of users to our site. We are still working to engage users through the site's interactive elements, I regularly open our inbox to find emails telling us how much articles and information on the site helped people. In the coming months the website will be transformed from a garage project with amateur design and graphics to a fully-fledged, registered charity with a new-look website, a growing team of contributors and additional sections for those affected by ADHD or Autism itself. During the course of 2013 we also look to a series of exciting initiatives. These include the launch of the world's first interactive online support programme for parents of children with special needs, currently being developed by a Trinity College PhD student, a disability tripadvisor style website and a major online social stories project. While I hope these endevours will help hundred of people and families on the autistic spectrum, we will have showed the right kind of leadership if we help just one single person. To get an initiative such as this off the ground is a challenge and I could not have done it without the help and support of 2 incredible organisations. Their untiring leadership in showing the public that young people and society benefity when young people's community service is cherished and their voices valued. These organisations are SpunOut.ie and Localise Peace Corps. SpunOut.ie made AspergersAdvice.org possible on two fronts. The Superhero grant scheme provided me with the finance needed to establish the site and the expert advice to

do so. They have also provided me with an opportunity to publicise autism related issues and indeed it was my first article on SpunOut.ie which led to a flurry of publicity taking me and AspergersAdvice.org all the way to the Late Late Show! The 2nd group I want to mention is Localise Peace Corps, where I am priveleged to work as an intern with the Director, Derek Cleary, who is with us this morning. Through working with Localise I have learned countless skills in project development and organisation, to quotes Elvis Presley, Localise believes in a little less conversation, a little more action and they demonstrate this daily, with the support of the US Embassy, in community service projects across Dublin. Ladies and Gentlemen, personal leadership must always work to encourage collective leadership in Irish society. In establishing AspergersAdvice.org I have tried to empower the public with knowledge of what Aspergers really is and to go some small way in tackling the longstanding public ignoarance around disability issues. I have also tried to challenge the established focus on the disability and not the ability, the condition rather than the person and the label rather than what lies beneath. I now ask you to provide collective leadership take home with you today, to your friends and family, colleagues and acquaintances that more must by done to support those affected by autism and disability in Ireland. This starts not in the lobbies of Leinster House or the corridors of the Department of Health but rather in how each and every one of us views, understands and treats people with disability. Please do engage with us come and visit us on AspergersAdvice.org, get in touch with your own view and ideas and of course follow us on Twitter. While the work of growing and developing AspergersAdvice.org continues apace, may I turn your attention to another important issue close to my heary youth suicide. I know that the devastation caused by suicide has probably touched every one of us gathered here this morning in one way or another. We live in a country which has the 4th highest youth suicide rate in the EU and on average 3 people per day are lost to it. This is another issue we so desperately need collective Irish leadership to address. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not an issue we can simply entrust to mental health charities or to Government but instead we must be that change which is so desperately needed. In Ireland we have a long, tragic tradition of sweeping our concerns and emotions under the carpet. Irish males in particular see it as a sign of strenght to bottle up our concerns not realising that in doing so we allow them to develop to stress, anxiety or worse. We need to change this and the message must go out loud and clear that talking is strength not weakness. We also stereotype in our society we tell young people what they must be and what they cannot be what's cool and what's uncool we cannot allow this to continue as it stigmatises those who do match these vague and media reinforced stereotypes. It was with this in mind that I recently launched a suicide prevention app called Grasp Life for smartphones with the support of the GRASP Life Foundation and 5 of Ireland's leading suicide prevention charities. This free, confidential service, using GPS technology locates your nearest support centres and allows the user to call or email, 24/7 365 days per year. This service is open to everyone, whether they themselves are in need of support or if they have concerns for a loved one. You can also find out more about mental healith and suicide through the app's advice section. With the kind support of the Irish Lions Club, our sponsor, we will soon be rolling out a national poster campaign across the island of Ireland targeting young people in secondary school, college, community centres and other

locations such as bars and nightclubs. Our posters and their QR codes will raise awareness of our app and how to download it. The app is available for download in both the iphone and android app stores. Once again returning to the theme of collective leadership I ask every one of you to carry this app on your phone which you yourself may or may not have to use it, you might one day have a friend or family member you are concerned about or if nothing else you can use it to inform yourself about this issue. As I conclude, I invite you all to take out your smartphone, type the word grasp into your app store and click download. Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you most sincerely for your kind attention and I look forward to our discussion.