Róisín Ingle laments the passing of her childhood home in Sandymount but recalls many happy years there, and days spent playing on the best playground of all - Sandymount Strand.

I can't go home, not really. They knocked it down, you see. After my mother sold the family home, the new owners demolished our white house on Sandymount Green, where the door was always on the latch and you had to shout over the voices of the inhabitants if you wanted to be heard.

The new house is painted a depressing shade of not-quite-brown-not-quite green. A sign to the right of the door reads Plastic Surgeon. Ladies inquire about having their faces lifted on the site where I grew up, and that speaks volumes about the way Sandymount village in Dublin has evolved.

Every time I go back there, which is often, I have an irrational urge to knock on the door of our house - or at least the house they built where it once stood - and ask them politely why they demolished our higgledy-piggedly home but kept our garden shed standing.

If I crane my head over our/their back garden wall from the Methodist church next door, I can see it, the last physical reminder of a family who once needed that space for bits of bikes or tins of emulsion.

Back then, the sign beside the door read Inglenook. Even though the house never looked like the kind that should have a name, Inglenook, carved in wood, fitted perfectly. My mother and father bought the house 40 years ago after falling in love with the two-bedroom former schoolhouse facing the triangular area of grass, conker trees and flowers. He was from Bath Avenue in Irishtown, she was an Eastender from London.

Five years ago, my mother sold the house, having just made the final mortgage payment on the original loan of £1,900. How it could take 35 years to pay off a mortgage of that size I don't know, but I believe there were a few near misses with the bailiff along the way. Four boys in one bedroom. Four girls in the other. But where did you sleep, I ask my mother now? "Sometimes upstairs, sometimes downstairs," she says with a smile.

Dinner was 6 p.m. sharp and our presence at the long wooden kitchen table was non-negotiable. All 10 of us, later nine, sat down to dinner every evening and told stories about our day. There was lots to tell because back then Sandymount had several playgrounds, only some of which have survived.

We had obstacle courses in the back garden and a tyre swing on the apple tree. In the land around Park Avenue and Windermere, both now home to apartment blocks, we climbed orchard walls and gathered blackberries. Scoring apples and berries on the same day was a good result as Mother would make an apple and blackberry tart for afters.

Some days, a sister or brother might say let's go to "the tins", the wasteland near Beach Road that has now been landscaped, and we would spend the afternoon making huts from cardboard and corrugated iron.

The best playground of all was Sandymount Strand. Around the corner from Inglenook, a barefoot stroll up Newgrove Avenue, a daredevil race across Strand Road and then down the stone steps in a tumble of buckets and spades and towels. Messing about in the "little cockle lake" and when we were older the "big cockle lake". Catching shrimp and crabs and sometimes - if you stood on them very carefully and didn't make a sound - tiny plaice.

We didn't want to go home so Mother brought the Sunday dinner down to the strand, all carefully wrapped in tinfoil. I have a mental photograph of that day. The sun is shining, the roast potatoes steaming and there's a leg of chicken in my sandy hand.

(High tides caused floods there last year and most of the pedestrian entrances along the sea wall have since been blocked up, but Dublin City Council is looking at ways of expanding access to this much-loved amenity.)

When our father died, the younger members of the family didn't go out to the cemetery at Deansgrange but were looked after by the Borzas, an Italian family three doors down who ran a chipper.

Back then, you could sit in the shop at formica tables and be served by Mrs Borza, who wore gold hoop earrings and a tight bun in her hair. But that day we huddled in their back sitting room as the family served up anything we wanted. So I discovered funerals smell like chips and, at eight years of age, that was fine by me.

At Christmas time, we put on shows in Inglenook for the nuns at Lakelands convent on Gilford Road where I went, grudgingly it has to be said, to primary school. Mother would adapt a pantomime for us to perform. One year it was Puss in Boots. I was a princess with two lines: "Father, I'm bored" and "Father, I'm still bored."

I went back to Lakelands the other week and found Mary Price, who taught me in infants, now the principal, the nuns having left some time ago. She was holding a summer school for children with dyslexia. I remember her warm and smiling, singing A Frog Went a-Courting He Did Go in the classroom when I was three. I laughed but I don't think she was joking when she told me this year's sixth class went out to celebrate their "graduation" in the Italian restaurant on the green.

Mrs Daly in sixth class encouraged me to write and, after leaving school and waitressing in London, I began my journalism career back in Sandymount at the local paper, News Four. My first "scoop" was an interview with the Hothouse Flowers, after I ran into them by accident at the cashpoint machine. The paper was run by Community Services, a CE project which my mother helped start more than 20 years ago.

Today, I sit in the Green and the memories of the scrapes I got into seem to whisper through the grass. There was the day I got my head stuck in the railings and the fire brigade had to come and cut me out; the day I burnt my leg after falling on to a plastic milk bottle that was melting in a backyard bonfire; the night I fell head-first on the pavement during a game of chasing, got a cartoon bump and a doctor from St Vincent's asked if I knew what day it was.

You would never think it these days but Sandymount, where everyone used to know everyone else, used to be a bit of a ghost- town. There wasn't much apart from the two pubs, McAuliffe's chemist, a post office, Mapother's newsagent, Miss Roddy's sweet shop and Bracken's grocery store where the Spar on the corner is now.

Today, you are lucky to find a parking space and the village is packed with people and places to go.

So many changes and yet strolling around, you can still hold on to and taste the things that have stayed the same.

The men standing outside Ryan's pub in the sunshine, putting the world to rights. Bruno and Angela Borza still serving the finest chips in Dublin. My Dad's brothers and sisters still living in the area. News Four is still one of those thriving but threatened CE projects that, in addition to being a useful resource for locals, helps the people who work there in so many important ways.

I dream of living here again, in this perfect mixture of bustle and seaside solitude, modernity and quirky character. For economic reasons - this is D4 remember - I doubt I ever will.

But I keep finding reasons to come back. I'm a northsider now, but I'll cross the Liffey for that perfect cod and chips. I do my banking on Sandymount Road. I'm still a member of the video store.

I even shop in the supermarket and remember a time when it was called H. Williams and the introduction of tortilla chips to the shelves constituted serious culinary news.

These days my mother and I go for lunch in the Italian restaurant, sip lattes in the smart coffee shops, browse in the boutiques or just sit in the Green and watch the youngest of her grand- children play where she used to watch us. Indian incense and dream catchers are sold where Miss Roddy used to dole out the penny sweets and pink cake.

I can't go home in Sandymount, but I will always feel at home. Memories, like certain garden sheds, are built to last.

Back Home tomorrow:

Kevin Myers returns to Leicester