TRADE NAMES:A Dublin man found his calling early in life and has steered a successful career in the driving business since then, writes Rose Doyle.

TOM COLLIER HAS lived a life worth the telling and tell it he does, in straightforward fashion, with verve and humour and more than the occasional insight.

An invigorated 72-year-old, he's been through the rough and smooth times in this country and in England, a driving instructor who's viewed it all from the close-up and personal viewpoint of the driving seat of cars and buses and, just as often, the passenger seat as he instructed drivers. "Driving was in me," he says, "I always loved it. It kept breaking out in me."

To good effect. Colliers School of Motoring, which does private as well as commercial tuition, was founded on Tom Collier's passion for the right way of doing things on the road. He's master tutor who has passed, with distinction, all of the instructing tests here and in the UK. "Eleven tests and I passed them all first time! I'm proud of my achievements in driving," he says. Chairperson of the Irish Driving Instructors Association for 10 years he's now its president. He's proud of that too.

Tom Collier has no idea where his passion for driving came from; nothing in his three generation Dublin stock gives a clue. His grandfather was a bacon curer in Lees of Mary's Abbey, his father a barber. Tom himself was born in the Coombe Maternity Hospital and christened in Halson Street church, near the vegetable market. "I lived in Drimnagh until I was eight years old. The mother died when I was nine months old and Daddy reared three of us after that. I was living with my grandmother in Lusk, when I was 17, where I went to serve my time as a carpenter. I didn't finish it; driving was in me. Same way as it's in my son, Nick, from when he could sit behind a wheel."

In Tom Collier's teen years in Lusk, as everywhere else in Ireland, you could drive at 16: "All categories. You just went into the tax office in Kildare Street and got a licence for 5/=".

So he got one and went to work for Nicholas McDonald, "a small haulage contractor" for three years. He was 19 when he left and went to Nottingham with his brother Stephen. "It was the 1950s. There was no work here. Things were terrible and poor. I was on £2 a week."

He worked for Williams and Williams, "putting in windows" but went to Birmingham when Stephen moved on. "My love of driving broke out again and I got myself a job with the West Midland Red Bus company. They sent me to driving school."

And it was there, in that driving school, that Collier knew he would become a driving instructor. "I spent eight weeks there, being instructed for 40 hours a week, 320 lessons before you could drive a bus. The way I was handled there, the way that driving school did things, gave me a sense I could do it, could teach."

He drove buses for a while but soon got together with "another Irish chap on the buses with me, Sean McNamara. We bought a mini and set up The Rotunda Driving School, naming it after the Rotunda Hospital, I don't know why. We worked it for three years but then Sean wanted to go one way and me another so we closed up and I opened on my own as Colliers and Sean on his own as The Falcon School."

That was in 1961. "I built up to five cars. I'd passed the Department of Transport tests to get my licence, and passed all of the regular check tests too. I got a grade six in the check test after four years - only 1 per cent of all driving instructors in the UK ever receive that! We stayed in Birmingham until 1971, then came home."

"We", by then included Mary Collier (nee Dunne) whom he'd met "at a dance where they were picking the Rose of Tralee. She was from Laois, from the Slieve Bloom Mountains, and 46 years later we're still together."

"We" also included three of their five children; Selena, who was two, Nicholas, seven, and Eamonn, five. Tony and Cathal came later, after the family had settled in Glenwood Road, Raheny, in a house bought for £4,800 in 1971 and still the family home.

"With my love of driving, again, I went on the buses, working for CIÉ out of Clontarf garage. I was giving lessons part-time and in 1976 left the buses and restarted my own driving school, running it from home. It was a big gamble, we had five kids by then, and Mary played a huge part in the school, answering the phone, taking bookings, running the office. How she did it along with looking after the kids I don't know. She still comes in to give a hand. She's one of the best."

He's momentarily silent, marvelling at the woman who's shared his life. "She did a hell of a job," he says, "a hell of a job. Nicholas came into the business and helped her. He was an instructor at 21."

Colliers School of Motoring was run from the family home/office for 24 years. In 1990, with three cars, the company opened an office in Finglas.

"Nicholas was the one pushed us into the commercial side of things," says Tom. "He's got my love of it and is one of the best around, highly respected by his peers. He's got his own transport business now, with 11 articulated trucks. He likes artics."

Selena has been running things for the last five years and loves her job. "I'm a qualified instructor but I prefer managing them," she says, happily. "Schools of motoring were hit badly during the Celtic Tiger years. Before, people would buy a car after they'd learned to drive but with the Celtic Tiger they bought first and took the minimum of lessons before applying for the test, which could take years and years. They'd drive on a provisional licence for all that time. Now, with the change and tightening of the law last November, we've got people coming back to learn, putting more interest into learning. It's very important for people to learn in a dual control car."

Her siblings have chosen other careers. Cathal is a nurse,Tony a solicitor and Eamonn, who studied sociology, a social worker in Cork. Their father is vehement about the dangers posed by non-expert drivers on the roads. "The car is a weapon. Moving a car and driving a car are different things. Looking back, I had 320 lessons before I took a bus on the road. The culture and attitude towards driving today is disheartening. But it is changing; since November."

His passions are for safety on the roads, good, informed driving, and he is concerned about how "only 50 per cent of people use dipped headlights on a wet day - see and be seen is the rule". People, he says, "don't use seat belts enough, nor child restraints. But the Road Safety Association is going in the right direction and today's young people are much better than my generation about drink driving. Of course you get the wild card in every community and family."

Colliers concentrates mostly on the city's northside, "as far as Lusk and Dunshaughlin", Selena says. "Customers are often farmers and haulage and building contractors, who need to get their people up to scratch. We do a lot of contract work; for Dublin Airport Authority, Aer Lingus, Cloverhill Prison, Kerry Foods, the Customs and Excise. We've three trucks and a bus and eight cars."

"I've handed over to Selena," Tom says, "but even now I love being out instructing, can't bear being at home. We've 11 grandchildren, so surely one of them will have a gra for the business and carry it on." He's glad to pass on a few golden rules: "I'm very strict on scanning and planning, on creeping and peeping and not speeding. Be sure it's totally safe before moving out. Mirror work is important."