A new house and plenty of assistance add up to money well spent for Dylan

Irish Examiner journalist Catherine Shanahan first visited Dylan Gaffney Hayes in 2014 after he received an €8.5m settlement for birth injuries. She paid a return visit last month to see what it is that money can (or cannot) buy

DYLAN Gaffney Hayes is essentially an eight-year-old multimillionaire who lives in a house with automated sliding doors and his own playground and a space-age bathroom. He will even shortly have his own gym.

But if this makes him sound fabulously privileged, know this: He will never have an imagination, the greatest gift of childhood, because brain injury at birth killed his short-term memory and so the power to imagine escapes him. He lives always in the here and now.