A Pauline Conversion on the road to Mount Temple

A Pauline conversion on the road to Mount Temple

My school memories are all to do with remarkable teachers. I started in St Columba's primary school in Drumcondra in the mid-1960s. I had a wonderful teacher called Bean Ui Chaomhanaigh.

My main memory was that I was in a class of 54 and when I think about it now, she must have been operating some kind of monitoring system. She had people in groups of eight, with the better kids helping the slower kids. It was crowd control, with that number of children.

Then, when I was about 10 or 11, I went to Loreto College, which was then in North Great George's Street, Dublin. I had two wonderful teachers there.

In the primary school there was a wonderful old dame called Pearl Glennon and I always remember her because she had polio.

She came into school on crutches from the North Circular Road, where she looked after her elderly mother. She was as neat as a pin: always impeccably turned out. She used to read poetry to us and she had prizes for kids who had good ideas. She really was interested in the imagination and would always let the class grind to a halt if someone had something interesting to say. There was a teacher in the secondary school called Miss Diggins who was, by extraordinary coincidence, also a polio victim. She was my French teacher and taught by the oral method, long before anybody else was doing it. She had a huge big tape-recorder and a slide show in this big old house in North Great George's Street. She would turn off the lights and close the shutters and it was like going to the movies. I still have very strong French and I wish I'd had similar teaching in other languages. I was very lucky to have a such a remarkable teacher.

In sixth year I moved to Mount Temple in Clontarf, a school that was surely a formative influence on what I've done ever since in my life.

There were remarkable people there. It was a school which had been amalgamated from two old Protestant schools, so it had quite a different ethos from anything I'd experienced and I really loved that whole sense that it was a different community of people. I think I had become progressively more difficult until I went to Mount Temple. All of a sudden the mist cleared and I met people who were prepared to engage with kids on any terms and weren't afraid of being asked questions and weren't afraid of controversy. I was just very, very lucky; I met people who I'm still friendly with. Mount Temple had a very strong music tradition. A wonderful man called Albert Bradshaw, who's still there, had a choir and he taught me all sorts of music. He really inspired a love of music that I'd never had before. When I met Albert I could see that music was a social thing. I joined the choir of Christ Church Cathedral as a result. I had a wonderful time singing and that gave me a whole extra dimension to my life.

In maths, there was a very brainy boy who used to give the maths teacher, Mr McEvoy, problems. The brainy boy would put up his hand and say, "What about if you did it this way?" Mr McEvoy would take off his jacket and role up his sleeves and he'd light a cigarette and then start working on the blackboard. We'd just all have to wait until he figured out the answer to the brainy boy's question.

Sean Brooks, the head in Mount Temple, was a great guy. I remember one particular incident in the school when the parents came and said they wanted a uniform brought in. He said that as far as he could see there was a uniform - a sloppy tee-shirt and a pair of faded denims, and he said, "If you want to put your own children in anything at all you like, you're free to do so."

He looked very strict and forbidding, but actually he was a very liberal and farsighted man. He had a strong moral purpose. He was really impressive as a person. He had high standards and expected other people to have high standards: he just took it for granted. He was uncompromising, but in the best sense. He was a visionary man.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly