Parents of Down's Syndrome children racing to get vital funds

WHEN Philip and Amy Keohane stood in Cork City centre last summer, watching scores of saddle-weary cyclists struggle up the near-vertical height of Patrick’s Hill, they cried.

The funds raised by the four-day Tour de Munster would go to Down Syndrome Ireland (DSI). Just days earlier, the Carrigaline couple’s eight-week-old only son, Nathaniel, who has Down’s syndrome (DS), had almost died of kidney failure.

“To see those people, who had no direct relationship with DS, put everything they had into getting up that hill, for my son and others like him — they were after four days of cycling, and it was Patrick’s Hill — it was as if they were saying ‘ye are not alone’. Amy and I were standing, with tears running down our faces,” says Philip, 35, who works for the Irish Defence Forces.