Aspies For Freedom

An autistic teenager with hypersensitive hearing is being tormented by the noise from a €145m construction site, it has been claimed.

The parents of Eric Hayes, who protested at the MacDonagh Junction development in Kilkenny on August 21, said the noise had made his life a misery.

"He has hyper-acute hearing. He can hear 100 miles away what we can hear 10 miles away and he would head bang big time to get rid of the sound," said his mother, Theresa.

Mrs Hayes said her son had banged his head against a pane of glass last July in frustration and had required four stitches in hospital.

The family live just 100 metres from the site. They have been forced to bring their son on long drives to avoid the incessant construction noise.

"Each day is a challenge now with him. We can't keep him in his classroom at home because of the noise," she added.

Mrs Hayes said she and her husband, John Joe, had tried to negotiate with Chesterbridge Developments and their builders, Michael McNamara.

"There was talk of relocation, but the deal they offered was absolutely pathetic," she said. "All the negotiations fell apart. It's a stalemate now."

They complained to Kilkenny Borough Council about alleged breaches of noise regulations and working hours at the site.

A spokesman for Kilkenny council confirmed that legal action taken in regard to breaches of working hours against the contractor, Michael McNamara, had been adjourned until October.

A spokeswoman for Chesterbridge Developments, in charge of the site, said: "MacDonagh Junction and its contractors have made every effort to adhere to these [noise] conditions [by An Bord Pleanala] and accept that, while the contractor had breached the condition in relation to hours of work on site, this has been addressed and is no longer happening."

The spokeswoman said the company had offered to assist the Hayes family in moving to a new house and that this offer still stood.

"We were surprised by today's protest, as we believed our discussions were ongoing. We will ask our solicitor to talk to the Hayes Family solicitor in an effort to move forward."

(Source: Irish Independent, August 22, 2006)

Autism can come with hyper-acute hearing? Why don't I have it?  

i have accurate hearing as well.  sometimes i hear things, and then everyone thinks i'm crazy, until it gets louder.  it can be a gift and a curse.

in short, it's netural...but i would be irrating at a contrstuction site.  i lived near a major freeway for about a year, annoying if we opened the door, and even when the doors were closed...ugh.  at least it was tempoary, no way i would have survived if it was going to be like 2+ years, and it was usually fine when the doors were closed.

i can't hear 100 miles away though...i need to get that tested though...but it helps me notice the music more accurtley....

Sometimes there are sensory oversensitivities (including but certainly not limited to hearing) but sometimes there are not.

I wonder whether I have more sensitive hearing than other people.
Some sounds seem to bother me more than other people but I like to play my music very loud so maybe not.

I think I have some kind of oversensory overload.

For example:  It's quite common for me to hear the mailman slip the mail into the mail slots on the doors of other apartments on our floor without anyone noticing the sounds.  Usually everyone else knows the mail arrived once it comes through our mail slot.  While our cat can also hear anyone in the hall, sometimes when we see her run off to the bedrooms we know something is going on out there.

Afew days my mom was surprised as to how I figured the mail man was out there, she said "Are you becoming like the cat now!"

100 miles away? Whoa. Good thing I don't have that hearing. Even if I did, it can't be that loud because it's so far away. Wouldn't ear plugs do the trick for the boy?  

Whenever I want to tune soemthing out, I wear ear plugs or listen to my CDs.
My hearing has been tested at normal but I am sensative to some sounds and notice some sounds others don't.

I'm sensitive to so-called "white noise"--like air conditioners, fluorescent lights, stuff like that.  Others I know HAVE to have it.  But intermittents, like construction hammering, don't bother me.

Could he use some sort of active hearing protection? Perhaps specially configured for him.

It is very common for lower class people to force their noise, especially their rape (misspelled rap) music down peoples throats. There is no apartment where the neighbor's drum beats do not come through the wall. Coke commercials on television make heros out of those who bully their neighbors by turning up their stereo systems. Radio stations all tell their listeners to turn it all the way up. Three years ago I learned of a woman in Atlanta who had high functioning autism and her trashy neighbors discovered that they could make her throw up by turning up their music; which they did because they found it a laugh riot to torture someone who could not fight back. This tells me everything I will ever need to know about their culture. Cat fancy magazine reported last year that the urban hip hop community - the same sadists who entertain themselves by taking advantage of the opportunity to torture people till they vomit - like to take pet cats away from children and feed them to their pit bull fight dogs while the children are watching.
     I could never live in an apartment for this reason. My neighbors can only be kept from spitefully cranking up their "tunes" by fear of locomotive horns, foot long Tesla coil sparks dancing about wires atop my fance, and home brew electronic warfare. They would like to have me dead for refusing to knuckle under and accept the music of their inferior and evil culture contaminating my back yard, and I am willing to defend to death my right to reject their music from my home. I will never take a Neville Chamberlain approach to their bullying cultural tyranny. Fortunately, the police are on my side, now. The neighbors get no sympathy from the police if these things happen every time they turn up their music.