I was born n in England but we moved to Ireland when I was four. I first went to a small national school in Adare in Co Limerick. I was only there for a year, then I went to school in Ennis. A couple of years later we moved again to Shannon and after that it was the one school all the way.

What I do remember from the first couple of years is every school I went to was just slightly that bit behind the school before. So I could go and be the most brilliant child that ever was, because I'd have already done division or something. I remember not letting on about this and we'd be given the work and I'd say, "Oh look, I have it all done," so they would think, "My god the child is a genius." So by the time I went to St Conor's national school in Shannon, I wanted to go to a new school every year so I could always be ahead.

I never minded moving schools is was all a big novelty, especially when I got to Shannon because the school was really, really big. There were just so many kids in Shannon at that time from literally all over the world. They were mainly people whose parents were Irish but they'd been born somewhere else and moved back to Ireland, so there would have been people in my class who were born in America and Canada and all over Europe - and there were two girls from Chile in my class who would have come over in about 1974. I just thought it was the most fantastically exotic place.

I stayed there until sixth class, then I moved on to St Patrick's comprehensive school in Shannon, the only second-level school in Shannon at the time. It was a good school in the sense that there was relatively little streaming. There was no A class or B class or that sort of stuff, you were just put into classes by alphabetical order. I quite liked school but I didn't really appreciate it. I went through thinking "this place is a big drag". It wasn't until I heard other people's experiences that I realised how encouraging it was, especially to people who weren't going to get 2,000 points in the Leaving Cert. There was an awful lot of emphasis on trying to keep people at school and to look after people other than those who were going to go to college.

I always had a good idea of what I wanted to do, even in primary school. I remember having a school magazine. I'm sure it was dreadful beyond belief. The teacher who helped us out, even though he wasn't teaching my class at the time, rose to some prominence since - Ger Loughnane, the Clare hurling manager. He was a bit of a charismatic figure even then, and obviously some things never change.

Music was compulsory for the Inter Cert in St Patrick's. Several times a week you'd go in to this fantastic teacher, Mr Sheridan, and he used to get us to sing - and I'll never forget Oh, Sacred Head Surrounded and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I really liked music, though I was useless at it. I remember the music exam where there were seven or eight pieces of notation and you had to guess what they were. We came out and I'd got all of them right. I remember the aforementioned Mr Sheridan saying to me that I should go down the town centre and put some money on a horse, because my luck was obviously in.

I think I was probably a bit of a nuisance in school. I wouldn't have been a bad student but I would have been very giddy and very fidgety. I had this friend called Pauline Gallery who I used to sit beside and I know we used to drive teachers mad. We were forever being separated. Eventually they'd relent and let us sit together again and the two of us just had to look at each other and the giddyness would start. She had these two dogs that followed her everywhere and we used to get great crack out of trying to coax them into the classroom.

There was hardly a ridiculous teenage prank we didn't get up to - all the usual ones like removing all the chairs from the classroom. I had so much energy for schemes. We always had some sort of scheme on the go and you think you're the first person ever to have done this stuff and aren't you magnificently clever and the teachers are probably sitting there going, "These morons, will they just sit down and read the book?" You come across kids doing it now and you go, "Oh, sure we were doing that in 1984."

In conversation with Olivia Kelly