I went to national school in a place called Kilcornan in Co Limerick. I started there in about 1953 and I was a bit old. I think I was five or so, and I was the oldest of a family of five. It was a country school and most of my father's family would have gone there in the earlier part of the century. Even though we were actually natives of another parish, Askeaton, we were located halfway between the two parishes.

I loved the national school. I found it difficult as the oldest of the family to blend in initially, but we had extraordinarily good teachers - in fact they have conditioned my whole life, they were so strong an influence and so good an influence.

We had a woman called Maura O'Sullivan, I would have been with her in third class and she's still alive and published a book of Irish poetry last year. For fourth, fifth and sixth, I had one teacher. He was an extraordinarily man- a Kerryman, Padraig O'Shea was his name. Where we were wasn't an Irish-speaking area but he actually had us speaking Irish voluntarily in the playground. He was so enthusiastic and so sincere about spoken Irish. He also had an accordion band in the school. Now I was no good at music, but I knew it was there in the background.

Where I was sort of good was geography and history. We used to have whole half days on the Irish army or military campaigns in South America or the geography of Romania - amazing stuff for national school. It was kind of like an indoor hedge school. It was a beautiful education really.

We were about three miles from the school, so my brothers and myself walked. A very exciting element of our lives going to primary school was getting lifts on the road from trucks and lorries - they'd give you as lift just for the chat. There weren't very many cars on the road in the mid to late 1950s, so it was exciting. The new national school was opened in 1954 and we had a coal fire and dry toilets. We had these slices of thick bread and bottles of milk and we tended to throw most of the bread away so we must have had the best-fed crows and pigeons in west Limerick.

It was a tremendous time. I know it sounds a bit sissy now, but I enjoyed being an altar boy - apples from the parish priest and all that. At that time, there was a country shop, O'Connell's shop, and I remember the first lorry pulling in with Tayto crisps - they were a new thing in our part of Ireland then.

During the winter of 1957/58 and the south pole expedition of Sir Edmund Hilary and Sir Vivian Fuchs, we used to get badges at the local petrol station of the expedition and we used to wear those lovingly. Some of us were fans of Fuchs and some of Hilary, and we loved those guys - they were heroes for us. That's how I started reading the newspaper, through my father reading the exciting expedition news for us in the evenings.

I got a county council scholarship and went to Askeaton secondary school in 1961. That was a rude awakening for me. It was a different system altogether and it took me a couple of years to adjust. We had a very free and easy kind of love of learning atmosphere in the primary school, but now there was the discipline of a timetable, classes and teachers changing over and examination systems bearing down on you, so it was an utterly changed world. By Inter Cert, I had found my feet in terms of what I was good at - history, language, that sort of thing. I came first in my county in the Leaving Cert in 1966 and got the first scholarship in the county to university.

Largely through the influence of a very good friend, John Madigan, I became involved in public speaking in secondary school for Muintir na T∅re. He and I and another friend, Betty Ranahan, were beaten in the Munster final, but the public speaking stood to us all our lives. The happiest thing of all is the three of us went to university together. We were probably among the first people in that area of Limerick to go to university when we all trooped off to college together.

I enjoyed school very much, particularly my primary school. It was a paradise, really. When you are innocent, you think your teachers are great - and they are too, but it was an age of innocence. It was a country life and it all made for a happy childhood. I found my the teenage years very trying really and I was shocked that people in secondary school were interested in things other than learning when I went there first. People were growing up, I suppose, and I was probably a bit slow, but I'd a very idyllic childhood. I loved it and I've great memories of it.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly