ACCOUNTANCY is not a branch of study which appears to lend itself to spectacular achievement. Despite its best efforts, the profession still seems to suffer from an image problem - having not completely recovered from the regular maulings it received from the Monty Python crew two decades ago.

Yet the achievement of Aidan Walsh, a 21-year-old student in Waterford RTC, is notable for a number of reasons. Walsh took third place overall in the world in this year's final examinations of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, only the fourth Irish student ever to take one of the top three places in the exams, taken annually by 5,000 candidates worldwide. Added to this is the fact that he took first place in the world in one of his subjects, strategic management accounting and marketing.

"It came as a big surprise," he says. "I felt I'd done well but to come first in the world is a big shock."

Taken alone, these results would mark Walsh out as an exceptional individual. Yet Aidan Walsh is also paralysed from the upper body down, with minimal wrist movement that just allows him to type laboriously with two fingers using a special splint. The paralysis is the result of a bad fall in a disco when he was 18, a young basketball and squash player embarking on the second year of his accountancy course in Waterford.

CIMA requires students to study 16 subjects in four years, with four exams each year. Walsh sat four exams last year in two separate sittings, each exam requiring a gruelling seven-and-a-half hours of typing.

"Ah, you'd be tired after it, all right," Walsh admits lightly. "It's two-fingered typing so it would be kind of slow."

The results of the examinations came in last month and Walsh is now taking a BA in business and financial studies, which he will complete this year because of exemptions given in recognition of his CIMA qualifications.

His current achievements seemed very remote in the aftermath of the accident. "I was in my second year and basically I had a bad fall and injured the spinal cord so I was paralysed from my shoulders down., more or less," he says. "I was in rehabilitation in Dun Laoghaire for nine months overall.

"Immediately after the accident everything was up in the air. You have to develop everything. You even have to learn to dress again. There are kind of knacks to doing everything. You do everything differently and it's a matter of learning that.

"They were marvellous in Dun Laoghaire because they get you going and you take everything one step at a time. It was a crazy period but I suppose early on I decided I would come back here. It was all part of the process of rehabilitation and coming back here was the next logical step.

"It wasn't too difficult coming back and I had great friends down here and they were able to help out."

The lecturers in the college and CIMA itself also extended their assistance and the college added a ramp on to the main road to facilitate access.

"The accountancy was something I could do, given my situation," Walsh says. "Had it been mechanical engineering or woodwork or something, where you need to use your hands, there would have been difficulties there. But with accountancy, given the computer, I could work away at my own speed, so there weren't that many changes.

"I suppose in certain aspects I have become more determined, in striving to get over these obstacles, to constantly achieve," he says.

WALSH IS NOW planning to finish his BA before considering where the next stage in his professional career lies.

His achievements in the CIMA examinations will do his career prospects no harm, but the accountancy profession in general is vibrant at present. The prospects for CIMA graduates are "extremely good", according to Tony White, divisional director with CIMA. The institute graduates 200 to 250 individuals in Ireland each year, of whom about 90 per cent get employment in Ireland.

"It's as near as we can get to full employment," White says.

As businesses grow, the need for a full-time management accountant grows with it, so most CIMA graduates find themselves working in business, banks and industry rather than private practice. With the Irish economy booming, demand for the skills of accountants is high and is likely to remain so.

"I'd say the great increase you saw in the 1980s, when student numbers doubled, is unlikely to replicate again, but the job levels now are likely to remain," White says.

But what of that image of the boring accountant? "It's a profession with a low image, but in many ways that image is 30 years out of date," White says.

"In the past, a lot of what trainee accountants did was semi-skilled work. Essentially, it was thought to be boring work for boring people, but that is not the case now."