The birth injury charity, Erb's Palsy Association of Ireland, is calling on young adults with the relatively rare condition to become role models for children growing up with a paralysed arm.
While an estimated 80 per cent of Erb's sufferers make a full recovery within three months of delivery, some 20 per cent of children suffer permanent paralysis.
Erb's is often caused by a difficult birth when a baby's shoulder is trapped behind its mother's pelvis and fragile nerves in the child's neck and arm become over-stretched or even torn. A typical Erb's injury is an arm in a "waiter's tip" position, rotated towards the body with the hand curled upwards.
With improvements in diet generally, heavier babies are being born worldwide but because the female pelvic anatomy has not changed, birth injuries are on the increase.
The association's founder, Mary Verbruggen, says Ireland is among the top three countries in the EU in terms of childbirth and, as Irish women have smaller pelvises than many other nationalities, they are at a higher risk of delivering birth- injured babies.
For the first six years of her son Johan's life, she thought he was the only person in the country with the condition.
She set up the charity in Galway in 1998 to ensure that other parents did not have to face the same lack of information and isolation that her family did.
Now the national support network is calling on young adults to help children like Johan, now aged 12 and who will not recover from the paralysis, to adapt.
"Young adults with Erb's who have grown up with a paralysed arm or an even worse form of Erb's can talk to our children about everyday things like changing schools, play- ing sports, making friends, further education and starting work. We want our parents to see for themselves that babies with Erb's Palsy have grown into successful and confident young people," Ms Verbruggen says.
Although she does her best to be a confidence-building ultra-aware parent for Johan, she can only relate to him as a person with two perfect arms.
She likens it to the empathy a man feels for his pregnant wife.
The lack of information in Ireland and Britain has left many sufferers unaware that there is even a name for what happened to them at birth and Ms Verbruggen encourages anybody to contact her if they believe they may have the condition.
The association has 155 members with the condition, 32 of whom live in Connacht, but Ms Verbruggen is convinced that there are a lot more Erb's sufferers in Ireland.
The Central Remedial Clinic runs an Erb's Palsy Clinic once a month and surgery is being carried out on people with the condition for the first time in Ireland.
Ms Verbruggen says people can join the association as silent members.
The most important thing is that the parent gets the relevant information and the child gets the treatment required as soon as possible, as some forms of surgery, such as nerve-grafting, must be carried out in the first year of life.
For further information on the Erb's Palsy Association or the condition, contact Mary Verbruggen on (091) 552 623, or check out the website at www.erbspalsy.ie. or e-mail info@erbspalsy.ie