Tony Caulfield from Dublin's inner city remembers a worker in a Government office slamming the hatch in his face when he was unable to fill in a form.

Betty Cummins, of Poppintree, Ballymun, recalls being offered a place at Vidal Sassoon in London as a hairdresser, and turning down the opportunity because she was terrified of being exposed as illiterate.

Marian Carry, of Dun Laoghaire, will never forget the humiliation of writing notes to her children's teachers, the children standing beside her and dictating the words while she struggled to copy them, the pen feeling like a bunch of thorns in her hand.

"You feel very degraded. You see little kids sitting in the park reading a book and you're thinking to yourself: `what I wouldn't give to do that'," said Ms Carry (45), who left school at 12 and became a factory worker.

Before learning to read five years ago through the Dun Laoghaire Adult Learning Centre, Ms Carry rarely left her local area because she could not read street signs.

If a toilet door did not have a symbol of a male or female figure, she was lost. She couldn't look things up in the Golden Pages or take down telephone numbers. She tried to avoid public mortification by carrying an empty spectacles case so she could pretend she had left her glasses behind. If asked to write something, she faked a hurt wrist.

"Life was a constant stream of situations where you were humiliated," she said. One in four Irish adults is functionally illiterate, which means, for example, that they cannot identify the correct amount of medicine to give a child.

Recently, the statistic that 25 per cent of Irish adults cannot function at the most basic level of literacy was highlighted by the UN's 1999 poverty report, which pierced the Celtic Tiger illusion by insisting that literacy was a cornerstone of a healthy economy.

Among older people the statistics are even more shocking: 44 per cent of 55 to 65-year olds are illiterate. While the education system has improved in the past 40 years, it is still the case that 17 per cent of Irish young people, aged 16 to 25, are functionally illiterate, compared to 3 per cent in Sweden and 5 per cent in Germany.

Talk to the people behind the statistics and you'll find a disturbing history in common. They were labelled "slow" by teachers who chose to concentrate on the brightest children in large classes. No matter how hard they struggled to keep up, they were ignored or, worse, branded as stupid, until they left school early, feeling stigmatised and shamed.

"I always felt that not being able to read and write was a terrible, shameful thing. It affects your whole life; your self-esteem is gone because of this thing," said Ms Cummins (52), who left school at 14.

"I feel people are cheated coming out of school because it's anybody's basic right to be able to read and write. I realise now that it wasn't my fault. I never missed a day of school. I had all the books and I didn't come from a dysfunctional family. But I was a quiet kind of a child, who never gave the teacher much trouble. She gave all her attention to the brain boxes."

In her late 40s, Ms Cummins took stock and approached the National Adult Literacy Agency for help. After two years of one-to-one tuition with a volunteer teacher, followed by group teaching, she sat her Junior Cert and got a B. "It was really hard work and quite an achievement. The best part of it was just knowing that you are not stupid and it was never your fault in the beginning that you could not read or write," she said.

Mr Caulfield (41), a worker in the hotel industry, left school at 13, worked in unskilled jobs and struggled with a drink problem, which he has now conquered, before realising that illiteracy was at the core of his feelings of shame. Before learning to read through the NALA, he could not read street signs or fill in a job application form. Once he saw his poorly completed application form thrown in a bin by the recipient.

"Schools were not very helpful in those days. If you were in any way `slow', you were ignored and left in the back of the class. No matter what way you tried to improve yourself, it wasn't good enough. If you put your hand up to answer a question, you were told you were stupid. And being from the inner city, you were told that you wouldn't come to anything anyway," Mr Caulfield said.

"When you left school and went into the working world, you were totally shattered and no one cared to help you. The only jobs you could get were unskilled. I eventually moved into contract cleaning. I could organise a cleaning schedule and have an office block done from top to bottom in three hours but I couldn't put it on paper."

The day he summoned his courage to walk into the NALA's office at Mountjoy Square, in Dublin, he walked around the square for half-an-hour for fear he would be laughed at if seen going into the building. Once inside, he never looked back. After three years, he completed his Junior Cert with an A grade. Recently, he was promoted in his job at a top Dublin hotel and faces a bright future.

In this buoyant economy where skilled jobs are abundant, literacy may be all that stands in the way for many people, particularly for 25 to 30-year olds who left school at 15.

The required level of literacy is rising, as jobs become more highly skilled, explains Mr Gus O'Connell, national co-ordinator for Youthreach within FAS. In response, FAS is integrating literacy training into work-skills programmes and the NALA is encouraging employers to help workers improve literacy on the job.

Literacy is a relative concept and in the information age, workers who could once cope perfectly well, are being challenged by new and unexpected tasks, such as writing reports. In their personal lives, many adults are being left behind because they cannot cope with basic tasks such as filling in Telecom share option forms, understanding mortgages or keeping bank accounts, said Inez Bailey, director of the National Adult Literacy Agency. "People are really disempowered in being unable to do these things," she said.

The Irish may have a reputation as a people in love with literature but in fact 60 per cent never use a library and 20 per cent never attempt to read a book, while a further 25 per cent never read anything substantial. And the situation is getting worse, warns Ms Bailey, who believes that a substantial portion of Irish adults are not engaged in a "culture of literacy".

"If people are not reading all the time, they are losing their literacy skills. The most many people will do is buy a tabloid to look at the pictures and the telly. We are not a great country for participating in learning throughout life," Ms Bailey said. "The education system is turning out fewer people with literacy problems but in society as a whole we are not keeping those skills up."

For information on improving literacy, contact NALA at 01-8554332. The Dun Laoghaire Adult Learning Centre is looking for volunteers at 01-2855633.