Chatterbox learned to hack it with wonderful English teacher

There are seven children in my family and we all went to the same primary school, St Vincent de Paul's on Griffith Avenue in Dublin. I'm right in the middle - I have four brothers and two sisters so a clatter of the Healys walked up Griffith avenue every morning for many years. I was there from 1965 to '72. It was quite a big school and in the junior years there would have been anything from 42 to 48 kids in our classes.

Starting school was never an issue for me because I had older brothers and sisters who were already going, so I have no recollection of traumatic first days. Because there were always other members of my family in the school, it was never a worrying place - except for when we did sewing and knitting. I was never any good at those things and that was really the only aspect of school that I really didn't like. I couldn't sew in a straight line and I couldn't knit anything that didn't turn out to be as tight as anything and I can remember having to unravel my scarves so we could start on the next knitting expedition.

At that age I know I would have been a chatterbox. The teacher I had, a woman called Miss Byrne, was almost at retirement age and with 46 to 48 kids in the class, I'm sure there were times when she found me very trying. She had certain classroom management skills, however. Each class had a patch of the garden so we would go out once a week and dig it up and plant bulbs - and I remember I spent more time out in the garden patch than any other child in the class. I do think it was to do with my chatterbox tendencies. As a result, I actually have a love of gardening and I'm a keen gardener. I can't do long division though, so I reckon I was out gardening when she did long division.

The school was run by the Sisters of Charity and they really ran a very tough regime. We were caned, we were slapped and I can still remember the childhood terror of knowing that because you were running in the yard and had been spotted, you were going to get six of the best. It certainly marked me in terms of how I would view authority. Even then I thought there was a kind of unjustness about using corporal punishment. Of course in those days if I went home and said I'd been slapped, my parents were quite likely to say, "well you must have done something to deserve it". Times have changed, thankfully.

In primary school I knew almost all the kids in the class. We lived on each others' roads and I would have been known up and down the street, so it was very much going to school in your own community. When I went to secondary it was the school my older sisters had gone to, the Dominican College in Eccles Street, and that was a real wrenching from the bosom of one's community. We had to get a bus to school. My two sisters had gone there but the year I started the younger of the two left, so I was very much on my own. There was no one else from my class and indeed there was only one other girl from my primary school who went there. I went into a class where most of the girls had come up from the junior school and they all knew each other, so it took me a couple of years just to relax into Eccles Street.

I wasn't really very interested in school, so because I'd have been fairly bright I got away with doing the minimum and kept my head down. It was really only after the results of the Inter Cert that I decided I'd better buck up and get stuck in and do a bit of work. In fact those last two years were really, really happy and I really enjoyed secondary school. When I did buck up and start to study, the academic subjects I was interested in turned out to be English, history and geography - and there's no doubt the teachers I had for those subjects were a huge influence on my desire to get involved and start to do some genuine study with a view to going to college.

I had a wonderful English teacher called Marlene Hackett and she introduced us to all kinds of wonderful elements of the curriculum, but also other works not on the course. I still have a love of English literature. It is absolutely because of her. I had a great history and geography teacher, former ASTI president Margaret Walsh. These women in particular were hugely influential on the kind of course I took in life. They were women who were interested in ideas, but if you had ideas you had to be able to marshal and express them. Therefore I could see very clearly the importance of writing a good essay or being able to make a point using your historical or geographical knowledge. That has very firmly influenced my sense of social injustice and the role of women in society - the belief that it was a desirable thing to be a woman of ideas and to want to influence social change - as I do in my role as chairwoman today.