I've been lucky. Throughout my life, my education has been enhanced by individuals who have had a positive influence. My first school was a tiny two teacher school, Bennetschurch, near Ballymacarbry, Co Waterford, which has since closed. To his pupils principal Padraig O Clerigh appeared a young, single and sophisticated man in his midtwenties. It wasn't until I moved on to second level that I realised how innovative he was.

He devoted a lot of energy to stimulating our creativity, which was unusual in the mid-fifties. We did projects on the environment (although it wasn't called that then), local history and music. I was delighted to discover, when I joined the Department of Education in 1993, that Padraig was an inspector. He retired 18 months ago.

At second-level I went to Kilkenny CBS, quite a liberal school with relatively little corporal punishment thanks to the progressive principal, Brother McGeagh. The school had a number of excellent teachers including two whom we regarded as young Turks. Both are still there - Tony Henderson who taught me maths and Paul Glennon who taught me English and is now principal.

Brother Lynch, though, was the person who had the greatest influence on me. A sophisticated, cosmopolitan francophile from Cork, he took a broad view of the world and made me aware of Ireland's European dimensions.

At school, science and maths were my best subjects and I enjoyed debating. I was hopeless at hurling - a huge social disadvantage in Kilkenny. I have clear memories of the night my parents called me into the garden to see Sputnik, the first spacecraft, launched by the Russians. It was then that I decided to become a scientist.

I stayed on at UCD to do a PhD, which was supervised by Professor Tony Manning. Although still in his twenties, he had a considerable international reputation in chemistry. He taught me that in order to succeed in the discipline you had to combine high levels of craft and attention to detail with creativity.

I moved into marketing with Unilever in Britain but returned to Ireland to the Department of Finance as an administrative officer working on national science policy. After a spell in Foreign Affairs, I returned to Finance and in the early Eighties decided I needed to study economics. My outstanding memory of the master's programme in international trade is the lectures given by Professor Dermot McAleese. I enjoyed his cool dispassionate approach to his subject and the connection he drew between economic theory and practical policy.

It was in the late Eighties that I met up with Dermot again. I was in Washington at the Brookings Institute on a Fulbright fellowship. He was with the World Bank and introduced me to leading world figures in economics who were either Washington-based or simply passing through.