Gamblers Anonymous is launching an awareness campaign next month. The addiction can exact a heavy emotional toll, but help is at hand.

By the time he was 14, Nick was gambling in card schools and backing horses. He remembers going into the bookies with a jacket over his school uniform.

Everyone knew he was a schoolboy and too young to be backing horses, but so long as he hid the uniform they took his money anyway. The money came from delivering newspapers and doing bits of work for his father. As fast as he earned it, he gambled it away.

It wasn't all he did. He was a good football player too - he remembers the manager used to have to come and collect him from the bookies. He eventually noticed that gambling was doing him no favours.

"I remember in my early twenties looking at all my peers going on fancy sun holidays," he recalls, "but I never had any money for holidays."

"By Saturday night I wouldn't have a shilling to go out and have a couple of pints."

By now he was working in accountancy, but spending too much of his time on the racecourses, spending the money he had been paid for work he hadn't done. His resolutions to give it all up were fleeting. "I'd be coming home from some small race meeting and I'd say why am I doing this? By that night I would be studying form."

The trouble was, no matter how bad things got he reckoned the next race meeting would be the one where he'd win big money. To make matters worse, he had got "connected" with a couple of horse trainers - and betting on tips from trainers and jockeys is, as many have found, a guaranteed way to increase your losses.

By now Nick had a partner and she eventually got fed up with the endless unpaid bills and the shortage of money and threw him out.

It was about the time of Cheltenham and Punchestown and he went on an absolute betting binge which left him in such an emotional state he wasn't even betting to win money anymore - he was just betting for the sake of it.

He was in this state when he met another gambler who had given up and who persuaded him to come with him to a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. He was "hugely self-conscious" walking into the meeting but he quickly found himself identifying with the stories he was hearing from the other men there (most members of GA are men).

He decided to make the attempt to give up gambling and he has not placed a bet, not even to the extent of buying a raffle ticket, since May 7th, 1998, a date he has never forgotten and recalls with pride. It wasn't easy. He remembers having to get away from the television on his first Sunday off the gambling because there was a race meeting being broadcast.

There were other advantages too, such as having money and the time to talk to people because he wasn't studying form.

When he had been off gambling for a year, his partner came to a meeting to mark the occasion and they resumed their relationship. They got married last year.

She handles all the money in the family. "I still don't trust myself with money," Nick says. "I get my salary paid into the mortgage account. On a Saturday afternoon if we're out shopping I don't have to worry because I don't have any money to gamble."

If anyone tries to talk to him about horses, "I just walk away".

His work colleagues reckon he's mean because he won't even buy a raffle ticket, he laughs. He is certain he could not have given up gambling without GA and that he could not stay off it without going to the meetings.

Nick's saving grace was that he decided to give GA a try after the first meeting. Some never come back and some walk out during their first meeting because they don't see themselves as having a problem, says Paddy, who is spokesman for the organisation.

It's a point of view he understands. "That's the way I was too," he says. His excuse for gambling was that it was his hobby. "I don't drink and I don't smoke and I have to do something after a long week's work". The "hobby", however, was taking up six days a week and a lot of money.

The curious thing about compulsive gambling, he says, is that despite the loss of businesses and homes, money is not the big problem. "If you are a compulsive gambler and you don't have money you will get it somewhere".

"It's an emotional problem, and that's the killer". The emotional toll is huge, with the loss of partners, families and other important relationships. Very often, it is family members who encourage the gambler to go to GA, perhaps because they have joined Gam-Anon, GA's support organisation for the families of compulsive gamblers.

Like Nick, he says it is vital that gamblers who have given it up keep going to their meetings and remain vigilant. There are meetings all over the country.

Dublin has 23 meetings a week. People who are afraid of walking into a GA meeting on their own can ring the helpline 01-8721133 and get the name of someone to ask for at the meeting.

Next month, from September 9th-15th, Gamblers Anonymous will be trying to raise awareness of the problem. On Saturday September 14th it will hold an open meeting in Carmichael House, North Brunswick Street, Dublin 7, at 8 p.m. Everyone is welcome.