Eight years ago, deep in Co Cavan, Martin McCormack's parents made a decision that was to change all of their lives. "Nothing could have prepared us for what happened. In hindsight, it absolutely changed me. I was the eldest, I was 15 at the time, going along quite content with what I had.

"Suddenly Mam and Dad had been passed as foster parents," he recalls, and the family became a foster home for children who needed to be in a happy, secure environment for different periods of time. "The change was enormous. It absolutely changed me and it changed things at home in a big way.

"The first week we got a pre-adoptive baby for six weeks. It was unbelievable. I had no memory of when my brothers and sisters were born, and here we had a baby in the house for the first time. We had the neighbours coming in. The baby was premature, two pounds in weight. My parents were up in the night feeding the baby. It was lovely, and lovely in that the baby was placed for adoption."

Then the McCormacks got three other children from the one family to foster. "After a while one went to another home but we still have one of them with us. We've had children for short periods also. The only way I can describe it is that we just celebrated things as a family."

At the time McCormack was attending Cavan Vocational School, shuffling with a range of career options. Gradually, as he met the individual social workers who had to visit their home and as he became familiar with terms such as "natural parents" and "signing consent forms," he started getting curious about their work.

"I knew I had a good enough personality to work with people. I knew some of the things that could happen to children. I thought I was suited." He did a four-year degree in social studies at TCD. Through this course, he also gained the necessary professional, internationally recognised, accreditation - the National Qualification in Social Work - when he graduated.

His work placements during the course gave him an insight into the job, he says, such as working in a geriatric hospital, St Phelim's Hospital in Cavan, in the summer after his first year. "When you're working you soon see that there's a lot more to it than just being caring towards people."

In second year he did community care in the Cavan/Monaghan area. In third year his studies included spending three days a week from September to February at St Vincent's Centre on the Navan Road, Dublin, where he worked with children and adults with learning disabilities. In fourth year he worked on a neighbourhood youth project in Summerhill Parade, Dublin.

After graduating last year, McCormack started work with the Eastern Health Board, where he is a community care social worker. Based in Raheny, Dublin, he works over an area which covers a large part of north Co Dublin from Kilbarrack to Balbriggan.

"Every day brings a new experience," he says. "It's never the same. I could be trying to catch up on paperwork and the next day there could be a crisis."

A number of high-profile cases in the past few years have helped to highlight the need to protect children and the health boards are responsible for this, he explains.

"A lot of people don't know what child protection is. It's not just removing children from the home or dealing with a crisis situation. There's also a heavy aspect in our work that deals with preventative work. We place a heavy emphasis on the presumption that it's in the children's best interest to remain at home.

"A lot will be crisis situations initially. We are so pushed with resources we work only with families where children are under 18 and where they are at risk of physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, rape, juvenile delinquency, criminal behaviour."

It's so important, he explains, that people can call on someone for support. "You never know what situation you're going to be put in. You need somebody who's going to be calm in a crisis, somebody who will be able to ask for supervision, to have confidence in yourself to ask for support - I don't know what I'm doing here, can you give me some help?

"You're not going to change the world but I wouldn't be in the job if I wasn't getting job satisfaction. You're helping families to help themselves. At the end of the period that you've been working with them, you see that the situation has changed for them and you know that the children in that household are going to be safe."

Ideally, McCormack explains, the social worker needs to unequivocally accept whomever he's dealing with . . . "you have to treat everybody as you would like to be treated yourself."