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Early diagnosis, early intervention, expert this programme will decrease both the severity therapies, specialist CP orthopaedic surgery and and the prevalence of CP’. She points out neurosurgery are important aspects of good that the earlier you can diagnose, the closer CP care. This is what Lily wants for all children with CP in Ireland. She put her research to good use when she published in 2020 what is now the definitive general book on Tommy’s type of CP, Spastic Diplegia-Bilateral Cerebral Palsy. Following this she was invited to join the board of the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, a global not-for-profit headquartered in New York City. Early intervention is essential because a child’s brain has enough neuroplasticity you are to the pregnancy or event when the brain injury occurred, which enables better understanding, leading to better management and prevention. to rewire and retrain While Australia, Sweden and pockets of the US are leaders in CP care, nowhere in the world has a programme of excellence across the lifespan. The excitement around what the CP Foundation The Foundation was seeking to roll out an Early Detection is doing in Ireland is manifest. Rachel Byrne, executive and Intervention Programme internationally. Lily made the director of the Foundation, stresses that the vision is ‘to case for rolling it out in Ireland, and the Foundation was make Ireland a world leader: we want to create a sustainable enthusiastic – ‘Ireland is a small country with an integrated continued care model for infants through to adults with CP public health service, which makes it a very workable model’. in Ireland, led by expert clinicians and researchers. We will As discussions progressed, ambition was raised: ‘While early leverage our extensive network and international best practice intervention is critical, CP is a lifelong condition, so we started to help drive the programme through collaboration.’ thinking about rolling out an evidence-based, best-practise CP programme of excellence across the life span.’ Professor Colin Doherty, Head of School of Medicine at Trinity, emphasises that ‘Trinity is working alongside other partners The next step was securing philanthropy: a group of donors to make real discovery in the development of new diagnostic including Lily’s eldest sons, John and Patrick Collison, co- techniques, new therapies and new pathways of integrated founders of the financial services software company, Stripe, care between the hospital and the community, and between donated €11.6 million, and the CP Foundation’s five-year childhood, adolescence and adulthood for people with Programme of Excellence to revolutionise the delivery of Cerebral Palsy.’ cerebral palsy care in Ireland was launched on 22 May. It will operate through hubs at Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork (UCC), and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and is based on four pillars: clinical practice, research, education, and advocacy. Lily stresses that ‘We are putting families at the centre of this programme and that is so important because until now there’s been no voice for the CP family at the table.’ Her intention, with her book, was to give families a ‘roadmap’ for navigating the condition. With the Programme of Excellence, she wants The priority areas for the initial phase of the programme every child born with CP to reach their full potential: ‘People are: early detection and intervention (0-2 years), led by UCC; with CP should only be limited by their brain injury, not by the musculoskeletal and orthopaedic care (including surgery), led treatment and management of it; they should be limited by by Trinity; community-based motor management services, led medical science, not by postcode.’ by all three institutions; and adult services and supports, led by the RCSI. The programme will help transform the lives of the estimated 12,500 people (3,000 children and 9,500 adults) living with CP in Ireland. By halving the age at which CP is diagnosed in infants, bringing it down to less than 12 months, and in many cases less than six months, and with the new Programme of Excellence for CP, the 150 children born with CP every year in Ireland should have significantly better outcomes. ‘CP is a spectrum condition, which varies from mild to severe,’ says Lily ‘and until we find ways to address the brain injury we won’t be able to think of the cure, but
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Ooooh, fashion! Suzanne Clotworthy Marr, BA (1965), former director of the Grafton Academy of Fashion and daughter of its founder, Pauline Clotworthy, talks Dior, Ib Jorgenson, the Trinity Ball, and why her mother always embraced new trends W hen Suzanne Clotworthy Marr was a Trinity student in the early 1960s ‘studying English, French and Mental and Moral Science, which was what we called Philosophy’, she had a more glamorous part-time job than most students – in the Grafton Academy of Fashion Design conveniently located ‘just across the railings in Nassau Street’. Although she doesn’t boast of it, she must also have been one of the best-dressed students: her mother, Pauline Keller Clotworthy, the founder-director of the Grafton Academy, made some of her clothes and the talented final-year students would run up designs for her for special occasions: ‘I remember for one of the Trinity Balls, the Dior look was in, with those big voluminous skirts. I had great fun in that.’ Suzanne was reared in the Grafton Academy– ‘I would go in after school to help out’ – and although she initially ‘resisted being sucked into the family business’, it was her destiny. After graduation, she would work alongside her mother for decades and would then take over as director herself until 2019. The story starts back in 1924 when the 12-year-old Pauline Keller ‘did a wonderful fashion drawing of a dress’. She was the daughter of a solicitor of German origin, Robert Nesbit Köhler (who changed his name to Keller at the outbreak of the First World War), and his wife Edith (née Thompson), a Quaker from Enniscorthy, from whom Pauline got her talent in art. The family was well-off and lived in Glasthule Lodge but did not splash out on clothes, so the fashion-mad Pauline would ‘walk up the pier at Kingstown [Dun Laoghaire] looking at fashions, and would try and copy the designs for her own clothes.’ The Kellers were progressive about female education –Pauline’s half-sister, Geraldine, was one of the first women to attend Trinity and Pauline went to the Metropolitan School of Art. ‘All she wanted to draw was fashion pictures’ explains Suzanne, ‘so eventually one of the professors, Seán Keating, advised her to go to London to study fashion drawing.’ She went to Browns Paris Fashion School and then to the British Institute of Dress Designers in Piccadilly where she learnt design and pattern-making, as well as drawing. She had pronounced talent but from an early age, her ambition was to bring teaching in dress design to Ireland, which had then no dedicated institute. Pauline Keller Clotworthy With a small loan from her father to buy equipment and rent premises, she set up the Grafton Academy in 1938 in ‘rooms overlooking Stephen’s Green’ (where appropriately enough Top Shop would be located) and opened with just 15 students. She designed the course herself, a four-year diploma where students learnt ‘drawing, pattern-making, sewing, garment-assembly and tailoring for coats and suits. All students worked towards a collection in their final year which they would use to get jobs in the industry.’ The annual shows became a feature of the Dublin calendar. The school grew fast and helped to develop the clothing manufacturing industry in Ireland, which remained viable for decades, until textile manufacturing moved to Asia.
