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The Sisters of Mercy were responsible for my early schooling in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, and it was these formidable but kindly women who introduced me to the world of learning at the ripe old age of four. There were no electric showers, gentle reader, but mothers scrubbed their offspring until they shone. As clean as my childish conscience, I stepped warily up the hill of Templeshannon to the convent for my first day in the classroom, an elder brother grasping me by the hand. I remember a teacher with a long stick which had a dual function as a pointer and an incentive to orderly behaviour. At break-time a bigger boy said he would "beat me black and blue" for some unspecified offence. I had never heard the expression nor had I been physically threatened before. This new world was interesting, but scary.

I rather doubt that the term "childcentred education" was in use in Ireland at the time. There was an ethos which I find today only in parts of the Muslim world. There was Right and Wrong - and Right usually meant doing what you were told.