Mr Michael Cummins, the man responsible for changing the name of an organisation with no money, is sitting in his office just beside the new £8.5 million (#10.79 million) Enable Ireland centre in Sandymount. The chief executive's office is in a portable building.

It is the day before the official opening of the centre and the name change from Cerebral Palsy Ireland to Enable Ireland. Although he admits his office is not the most luxurious, that is the way it will stay. The new building, he says humbly, is "for the children". Following more than 30 years in commercial life, the sixth-generation Dubliner seems content with his lot. He took his Guinness and Irish Distillers pensions at the age of 50. A pensioner for the past seven years, Mr Cummins says he is not going to retire; he doesn't believe in it.

"I believe once I have something to offer, that I'd like to offer. I like working hard. I like playing hard," he says.

In June last year he became chief executive of the State's largest provider of services to people with physical disabilities - Cerebral Palsy Ireland (CPI), now Enable Ireland.

While the post, at first sight, seems different from anything he has done before, Mr Cummins believes there are more similarities than meet the eye.

"I felt privileged to be offered the opportunity to do something, to give something back. You could say that, commercially, I was training for 30-odd years to come in and take over this role." He may have been in similar executive roles in the past, but every new post is a pioneering one for Mr Cummins. "I always believed that everything I was doing I was in a pioneering role," he explains.

When he worked for Guinness he was trying to establish lager in the Irish market, when only 7 per cent of people drank it. When he moved to Irish Distillers he was a pioneer for Irish whiskey and established Jameson as a million-case brand around the world. He also saw himself as a pioneer in the Campbell Bewley group, where he was chief executive most recently. With a Master's degree in Management Science from Trinity College, Dublin, and a Diploma in Marketing Science from Harvard, Mr Cummins was well equipped to undertake a pioneering role with CPI. The challenge was to transform it from an organisation where there was, in many cases, no adherence to a national policy, into a respected business organisation.

One of the main tasks he has had to undertake over the past 16 months has been to lobby ministers to allocate more money to the sector. Because the organisation is only 80 per cent funded by State agencies, Mr Cummins set up a separate company, CPI Enterprises, in a bid to fill a funding gap. With 17 shops in the Republic, the retail chain has a turnover of £4.5 million and is "probably pound for pound the most profitable and best-run retail charity shop operating from the British Isles".

Mr Cummins can say that comfortably: other big organisations are looking at how the organisation runs its operations. The profits from the retail units are used to build up the organisation's capital reserve and none of it, he insists, is used to shore up any shortfall in revenue - £1.7 million this year - to keep the 12 CPI centres running.

When Mr Cummins took up the post as chief executive, he saw CPI as the Cinderella of the disability area - it was badly underfunded. He now expects that Enable Ireland will be fully funded from a revenue point of view in two years.

"We are moving very, very quickly to having service agreements. We are going to be a professional provider of high-quality services to health boards all around the country, with five-year service agreements based on our ability to deliver value-for-money quality services."

One of the roles he sees for himself is in trying to help the health boards get the money to allow Enable Ireland to deliver the services.

The organisation has matured since Mr Cummins joined its ranks. Then it was an organisation that he describes as unprofessional. It had no great business skills. It was never perceived to be a business or heading towards being a business. He looked ahead three to five years and said: "This is going to be a business, with the same opportunities, difficulties and problems like any other business that I've ever been involved in."

He introduced a new accounting system, and within two months he completed a strategic review that had been running for three years beforehand. Out of that came a business plan for 2000 and a three-year £55 million development plan. The board structure was also changed. He visited every centre in the first two months to listen to the staff and asked every board and every committee to commit to a national policy.

In his first two months he realised there was a lack of funding in the sector and sought a way to bridge the gap.

"The basic issue now for us is to keep going until we get into full funding. It is becoming more and more difficult to raise funds because more and more people are out there trying to raise funds and they're increasing all the time. Really, it's a rat race."

Mr Cummins had felt his organisation was not ready to talk to corporate Ireland. Now it has its act together he believes it is recognised as one of the more professional voluntary bodies. Enable Ireland is now run like a business and if corporate Ireland is looking at its own objectives and wants to put something back into the community, Enable Ireland is an ideal vehicle, he believes.

Some corporate help was needed with the change of name. A huge step for any organisation, it should have cost CPI £750,000. But, says Mr Cummins, "when you cry, when you plead and you ask your stakeholders and you get everybody around the country to help out", it cost less than £50,000. It is what he calls "the miracle of the loaves and fishes".

He gives two reasons behind the change of name. "People felt that the name shouldn't be disability-specific - only 30 per cent of the client base had cerebral palsy." Anyone whose disability is primarily physical is initially referred to Enable Ireland.

One of the things that is developing in the area, he says, is being politically correct in relation to how people with disabilities are described. "The whole language of disabilities is an ever-changing process." He has even had to put in place a publications screening committee to review any material before it is published.

"After 35 years of training commercially, where I was interested in profit, shares and making money, my job is not to do that. My job is to provide high-quality services to those who deserve them. So I don't necessarily have to balance the books - [though] I'd love to be in the position to balance the books. But I have to run the business very responsibly. We are very lucky . . . to have a strong balance sheet."

He believes that the more professional an organisation becomes, the more transparent and accountable it becomes.

"The more you train your management the more likely you are to be given the contracts to deliver the services. So we really see ourselves competing in what hasn't been a very organised sector until now. The days of the voluntary body are disappearing."