Alma Mater

My father was a school inspector and we moved around every four or five years. As a result, I attended a lot of different primary schools. When I was about eight years old I spent a short time at Farnham's School, a two-teacher school three miles outside Cavan town.

It was an old landlord school - the patron was Lord Farnham - and was co-educational and religiously mixed. It was my first encounter with Protestant children and I discovered that they were no different to the rest of us.

Mrs Magahy, the principal, a lovely, kind, caring woman, was Church of Ireland, while her assistant was Catholic. Attending Farnhams influenced my subsequent interest in multi-denominational education.

Probably because I had attended so many primary schools, I decided I wanted to go to boarding school for second level. I chose the school myself - the Convent of Mercy in Ballymahon, Co Longford. I spent six very happy years there.

We lead very sheltered lives, but that wasn't uncommon in convent boarding schools in the Fifties.

The school had a very strong musical tradition. Mother Cecilia assumed that we all had talent and ability and she challenged us to reach high standards. Everyone participated in the choir, the orchestra or in musical productions.

The school was also very strong in maths. Sister Berchmans, our teacher, believed that girls could do maths and a number of us went on to do honours maths which was quite unusual at the time.

As role models, the nuns were efficient and effective. They took it for granted that we could set our sights high. The gender issue didn't arise and it didn't occur to us that there were academic goals we couldn't achieve. It was only after I left school that I realised that for women, the world was limited.

After Leaving Cert I got "a call to training" - that is, I went to Carysfort College in Blackrock, Co Dublin, to train to be a teacher. I lasted only three months. At the time, my parents were living in Dublin, but I wasn't allowed to live at home. I had to board in the college.

The regime was tough and extremely restrictive - far more so than boarding school. Our reading was censored and discipline was very strict.

I joined the civil service and worked as a research assistant at the Department of Education on the Investment in Education Report of 1965. It was a fascinating experience to have worked on what was to become a landmark report. I met my late husband, Bill, there.

Because of the marriage ban, I gave up my job in the mid-Sixties, but had already embarked on a night degree. I had always intended to go back to teaching and in 1968 I decided to do a H Dip in Trinity. By then I had two children. It was at TCD that I met Susan Parkes who developed my interest in the history of education.