'As soon as I got polio my education ceased'

While we chat, Jim Costello (60) leans sideways periodically in his chair."I'm pumping my diaphragm," he explains. "My breathing is 75 per cent paralysed. I have to think about breathing all the time and pumping the diaphragm is one of the tricks I have like that to help.

When I lie down I cannot breathe on my own at all. I need a ventilator to breathe."

Jim, chairman of the Post Polio Support Group (PPSG), contracted acute respiratory poliomyelitis in 1958, when he was 15.

"I was in Clongowes College, and the only boy that got it out of 366. They thought I probably got it at a rugby match in Lansdowne Road, from someone coughing over me." He was a supporter at an Ireland-Scotland international and there was a small outbreak of polio in Scotland at the time.

He was brought into hospital on a Sunday, he says, with suspected meningitis, and by Wednesday was in an iron lung - a casing the length of his body in which he lies, his head sticking out the top, which effectively pumps his lungs for him.

He was to spend the next three years in hospital - 18 months in Cherry Orchard and 18 months in the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford, England.

The polio has paralysed his upper body and since his teens has worn a spinal brace. He has no use of his arms.

"I can't live on my own. I need 24-hour care. I can do nothing for myself. I can walk, but I cannot feed myself, dress, bathe, toilet."

He lives at home three or four days a week with his partner of 20 years, Delia, and the rest of the week is in Cherry Orchard hospital, where he is Ireland's only user of an iron lung.

"As soon as I got polio my education ceased, though I worked for many years in the family business, in the clothing trade. In the past few years my respiratory system has got worse. I have intolerance to cold and pain in my joints and muscles." He says he has to rest more and use the portable respirator more frequently.

"We've been battling for 10 years," he says of the PPSG, which he helped found in 1993. "Polio is a forgotten disease. The people who contracted it have been forgotten. But we hope that with this report the Government will begin to take notice and give us the support we need so badly."