Mount Temple woman’s award for ‘shaking up’ education system

A chance meeting with an American educator resulted in Mary Moran undergoing “a complete career change” over 30 years ago, and one which she is extremely passionate about.

The Mount Temple resident is the founder of a structured literacy reading programme called DcodeDyslexia, which has just been awarded €20,000 and a place on Social Enterpreneurs Ireland’s Impact Awards accelerator programme.

The chance meeting which was to change the course of Mary Moran’s life came about as a result of her other great passion – for horses. “At the time I was working in the OPW and I was totally disillusioned with my job and was looking for a career change,” she explains, “so I met a lady from Boston who had trained in the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching literary and from the very first minute I heard about it I was obsesses,” she recalls.

The lady in question was Kate McMahon, who eventually ended up leaving the United States and moving to Ireland, even though she had no Irish background. “She got a room in the Health Centre in Tuam and started tutoring dyslexic children privately, and when I sat in on a few of her sessions to watch the way she was teaching I just became addicted to the whole method.”

That led Mary Moran to leaving the OPW and undergoing rigorous training in the Orthon-Gillingham method of teaching literary, along with the required teaching hours, and she has been teaching structured literacy to dyslexic students ever since.

She moved from her native Galway to Rosemount many years ago when her husband, Padraig, who is an Army officer, was moved to Mullingar, and the couple eventually built their own home in Carnafin, Mount Temple, where they have lived for over 20 years. The couple have two grown-up sons, Jack and Ben.

Mary Moran points out that one in every five students in Ireland is dyslexic, and she says the inability to read creates “a myriad of problems” throughout a child’s life, particularly if they go into their teenage years without getting help. “”Many of these children are extremely bright, but a lot of them go through life and they never reach their potential, and all because they haven’t been picked up by the education system and given the help they so desperately need.”

While she has attempted, throughout her professional life, to “shake up” the Irish education system and ensure that dyslexic students are identified as early as possible in schools, she admits that “nothing has really changed in over 40 years” to address this huge societal problem.

In her early years of teaching dyslexic students, Mary Moran was on contract to the first Gaelscoil in Athlone, which was on the grounds of Marist College, and she now teaches students in her home on a private basis, but she says everyone involved in teaching structured literary is “completely overwhelmed” because there is such a “huge need out there.”

Mary points to the fact that, despite the fact that dyslexia is a language-based disorder, it is still “extremely difficult to get an exemption from studying Irish” in our current education system, and she feels this needs to change urgently.

In her work she has seen “very high levels of trauma and frustration” in both her students and their parents, and this prompted her to set up her own structured literary programme, called DcodeDyslexia, which is entirely based on the Orthon-Gillingham method and uses color-coded phonics to create a fun and engaging learning environment for students of all ages and abilities.

“I felt my own time for teaching was running out and I wanted to ensure that there would be a structured and easy-to-use programme that could be used by any educator to teach dyslexic students, so that’s why I created DcodeDyslexia.”

Mary Moran is extremely passionate about her job, and strongly feels that the inability to read should “never hold any student back” because it should be picked up immediately in our education system and addressed in a timely manner with the proper interventions.

“I have seen first-hand how dyslexia has ruined the lives of otherwise very intelligent people, and has also ruined the lives of their families,” she says, “so I suppose you could say it has been my mission in life to try to address what really is a huge societal problem.”

Last week, the Mount Temple educator was delighted to be named as one of the recipients of an award on the accelerator programme run by Social Entrepreneurs Ireland (SEI) and a cash prize of €20,000, and she will also exhibit DcodeDyslexia at the National Ploughing Championships in Laois later this month.

The Social Enterprise Ireland Impact Programme identifies high-potential social entrepreneurs and supports them through significant funding and mentoring, as well as providing access to a network of support.

Impact Programme Awardees receive training in areas such as fundraising, governance, leadership, and storytelling. DcodeDyslexia was selected for funding from more than 100 applications from all corners of Ireland, and she Mary Moran had to undergo a rigorous interview process before being announced as one of the successful applicants.

The five awardees were chosen upon showing how their programmes are "shaking up" the traditional ways of dealing with social issues and are providing innovative solutions, according to SEI.