‘Staff helped patients like me to believe we can get on in life’

OLIVER Murphy, Ireland’s first paralympian and co-founder of the Irish Wheelchair Association, was one of the first patients to attend the National Rehabilitation Hospital.

Mr Murphy, now 75, was a patient at the hospital in 1962. He still attends the hospital’s out-patient spinal injuries services and remains in good health.

In 1959, at the age of 25, he was paralysed from the waist down after falling while he worked at the Sugar Factory in Carlow.