Galway charity is giving it socks!

When mum Ruta Graham got involved in a once-off awareness campaign for Down Syndrome in her native Lithuania, she got her mum to knit some tiny woollen socks.

Even though the 2018 campaign had ended, her mum had kept up the knitting and very soon she had a large bag of different coloured socks.

Socks were chosen as the campaign symbol because chromosomes look a little bit like pairs of socks and people with Down syndrome have an extra copy of the 21st chromosome.

The pairs have different colours to represent that we are all different, extra chromosomes or not.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to say oh, they don’t need them anymore and instead said, you know what, send them to me, to Ireland I’ll do something with them,” recalls Ruta.

In 2019 she founded the Lots of Socks campaign in Galway, raising €4,000, which helps fund speech and language therapy for children through the Voice for Down Syndrome Galway. Ruta lives in Moycullen with her husband David and three children, including Adam, 6, who has the genetic condition.

“We’ve had socks sent to us from Dublin, Monaghan, Cork, Wexford, all over Ireland. We also received socks from Slovakia this year and some are coming from Australia.”

That first year the volunteers started with 200 pairs of socks, last year that jumped to about 1,500.

Project coordinator of Voices for Down Syndrome Galway, Carmel Hannon, estimates they will have approximately 5,000 pairs of knitted socks to share and wear this October – all voluntarily hand-knitted.

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