MARIAN BECAME the mother of a teenage dropout last year, after a troubled history with schools that couldn't help her son. Helen reckons that her son won't be invited back to his private school, the fifth he's attended in his 10 years at school, after he does the Junior Cert this year. Stephanie Mahony remembers how she had to ring ten schools to find one that would take her child.

What do you do if you are the parent of a square peg who doesn't fit into the round hole of the Irish education system? Most of us assume that in the enlightened 1990s, schools will understand that troublesome children are often troubled, and that teachers have remedial and psychological services to turn to for children who need it.

Up to a point, that's true. But Marian, Helen, and Stephanie know that if your child has the kind of behaviour problems that make it difficult for them to learn, and make them disruptive in school, you will have to fight for the kind of education they need.

And they've discovered that just because the law says your child must go to school until he or she is 15 doesn't mean that any particular school has to take them.

Marian, Helen, and Stephanie Mahony, chairperson of the ADHD Support Group, all believe their children suffer Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a behavioural problem that makes it extremely difficult to concentrate. And both Marian and Helen feel the education system has let them down, because it can neither cope with their children, nor find them a school, or a teacher, that could.

Worse, they have to suffer the scepticism of many educators and doctors who don't really believe that ADHD, or ADD, exist. Like ME, the so called "yuppie flu", it's still a controversial diagnosis with a controversial drug treatment, and is regarded rather the way dyslexia was 20 odd years ago - as a parents' trendy excuse for bad behaviour.

If your child suffers from the kind of behaviour problem/learning disability that makes it very hard for him or her to cope in school, you will first have to try and find out exactly what is causing it. As Helen will tell you, this can be very difficult: her son attended up to ten doctors, most of whom made her feel that her son's problems stemmed from something she was doing wrong.

"A child suffering from ADD can not sit still, will appear bold, disruptive, is easily led, has very little patience. His behaviour affects the whole family, it creates absolute chaos." Both she and Stephanie Mahony say that such a child can put serious strain on a marriage; often a father will blame the mother's lack of parenting skills, as do many outside the family and, often, the mother herself needs psychiatric treatment just to cope.

And all the time, the parents worry about how to make sure their child gets an education, without wrecking their confidence: since such children are disruptive, they're often in trouble in school. That's why Marian agreed to let her son drop out she believed his school was destroying his self esteem.

HELEN FEELS THAT her son's bad behaviour over the years has alienated people, with the result that he hates people and is suspicious of them. And she regrets that one of his primary schools put her off using the drug Ritalin to calm his hyperactive behaviour: she believes if he had taken it from the age of six, instead of just for the past few years, he might be a different person.

Ironically, a typical middle class child with a behaviour problem like ADHD might be the last one to get the attention that he or she needs. After years of neglect, services for mentally and physically handicapped children are slowly improving, as are services for children in areas of obvious disadvantage. Just last week, the Department of Education announced the appointment of "teacher counsellors" to a number of inner city schools, where their job will be to address disruptive behaviour and persistent behaviour difficulties.

The Department of Education is moving in the right direction, but in the end of the day it needs a lot of money to provide the kind of services needed: it has only 14 psychologists to provide a schools' service for the whole country (plus two very successful pilot projects in Tallaght and Tipperary). It has three schools for children with dyslexia in Dublin and one in Cork.

About 77 per cent of primary school children have access to a remedial teacher, but in practice, may not have enough time with him or her for the service to make much difference. Only 33 per cent of second level schools have remedial teachers.

The Minister for Education has recently recognised the importance of guidance counsellors in second level schools - but not all schools have them, and the average ratio is one counsellor to 500 pupils, when it should be half that, says Father John Dunne, president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors.