A little boy climbs up the carpeted stairway, watched by his mother and his physiotherapist. They praise and cajole him all the way up and then back down again. "Can you get up to the top one again?" they ask. The game goes on and on. "Brilliant," they say. He walks away crookedly on his damaged ankle, beaming at his achievement. It is 2 p.m. The paediatric department of the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin's Clontarf is ready to rock. Children whizz by in wheelchairs. It's a busy place. Some young people going by on crutches are heading for their exercise sessions.

Ruairi O'Donnell, the only male physiotherapist in the department, is in a light-coloured shirt with short sleeves and navy trousers. He's spent the morning with a class of 10 teenagers who have spina bifada, going through various exercises that will help strengthen their arms and improve their trunk control. They get out of their wheelchairs on to mats and the weight-lifting begins.

"It's great craic," says O'Donnell. "There's a fair bit of messin' but I don't mind as long as the work gets done. They are normal in every other way bar their physical problem. They all listen to Eminem and they have their mobile phones."

He says it's not a question of being kind or gentle or understanding with those who come for physiotherapy. Sometimes it takes a firmer tone to motivate a teenager. "You have to badger some of them," he explains. "You need to be really focused on your client's needs in order to help them. The real challenge is to keep in mind what they'll be doing for the rest of the day. Have you educated them about looking after themselves? "You've got to work with people towards their goals - you've got to be able to think from their perspective and work from there. You've got to be interested in helping people.

"It's really up to us to create the right environment to hold their interest. We have to think about what we are going to do.

"I have to be very innovative when working with children, thinking of ways of getting them to practice," he says. "You need to think of what interests them. You have to be able to motivate people. You have to be energetic. You don't have to be sporty yourself. You have to have patience because progress can be slow."

They learn how to roll, sit up, stretch and bend over. At another session, he gets one child to sit on the floor and roll a ball over and back to his mother. Another child sits on a bench and reaches up high to get jigsaw pieces, which is "good practice to get the muscles working around the trunk as well as the arms".

He became interested in physiotherapy when he had to go for treatment himself after receiving a leg injury from running at 15. "I had been interested in PE," he recalls. He visited a number of physio departments in the Limerick area.

He sat his Leaving Cert in 1995, applying to TCD and UCD and eight colleges in Britain. Although he got 515 points, demand is such that it wasn't enough for a place in Ireland, so he went to the University of Manchester. The classes were big, with over 100 in each year, 10 per cent of whom were men.

He graduated as a chartered physiotherapist in 1998 with a BSc (hons) in physiotherapy. His studies included working on placement to build up to over 1,000 hours work-experience in a range of departments. He worked back in Ireland in a number of different places, including Kilkenny Regional Hospital and in Dungannon, Co Tyrone. "You learn an awful lot in your first 12 months with the team," he says.

Then, he began work at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin. "It's a great place to work," he says. With a team of 12 paediatric physiotherapists, it's the largest department in Ireland, he adds.

O'Donnell says physiotherapists in the future will be involved in helping to integrate children with disabilities into programmes at their local recreation facilities. "I'm looking forward to working closer with PE teachers, swim teachers and coaches so we can improve provisions in this area."