Cliona O Rourke - Co-founder and Operations Manager

Hi I’m Cliona O’ Rourke and I am the co-founder and operations manager at My Canine Companion. I have worked in the assistance dog area for nearly 25 years in several roles from puppy supervisor to assistance dog instructor as well as being a qualified dog groomer.

In 2004 I trained in Canada as an autism service dog instructor and returned to implement the first autism service dog programme in Ireland. I became the first person in Ireland and Europe to train a service dog particularly for a child with autism. I have since worked with several training schools in Europe helping them develop their services. 

In 2011 I felt I could do more with the programme to reach more families of children with autism so along with my husband Niall I set up My Canine Companion. The aim was to provide an individualized service where parents of children with autism could support and empower each other. 

We introduced our unique puppy programme which is now our primary service. This involves a totally different approach to training whereby our puppies are placed with their end user family rather than a volunteer. This is an innovative approach which involves a much greater interaction and participation with client families and ultimately results in a 90% success rate of puppies qualifying as service dogs. This is twice that of traditional training programmes.

My role with MCC is to oversee the day-to-day operations from training and qualification of our service dogs, client service management, staff training, breeding programme management, management of our therapy programmes and strategic planning for future services and training.

I love working with the staff and we all learn from each other every day. I am particularly proud that we now have 3 previous clients working with the charity. Nora, Tracey and Laura all displayed natural dog handling qualities while I worked with them as clients and they of course offer us a unique perspective into working with families of children with autism. Our staff as well as the extended organisation are like family and all strongly believe in our motto “bringing families together”. 

Finally, I am the mother of 3 girls aged from 4 to 9. All 3 have been born since we founded the charity and all of them have worked with us from helping with fundraising days to playing the part of our clients while we are doing attachment training.