I was little Miss Punctuality

I seem to have been in school all my life. I was in primary and secondary school in Thurles in the Presentation Convent and then I went to Maynooth. From then until I was elected - I was teaching in Sion Hill. Then I got to be Minister for Children, so I spend a lot of my time with children in schools.

I loved all of it - from the day I first went I loved school. I promptly came home and said I wanted to be a teacher.

Even from the very early years, we always had elocution exams and the piano and Irish dancing. So I was as much into the extra-curricular stuff as I was into the school itself, which I also loved. We did a lot of singing and choirs, so I had a nice, rounded education. I remember in primary school going to do oral Irish competitions, showing off all the Irish I knew, even though I was only a small child. I used to play piano in the Tipperary and Munster fleβdh ce≤l, which was great.

I made great friends in school because we were all from the town, so I was together the whole way up with people I grew up with and lived with. Many of us were together from the day we started school.

I always liked challenges in school. Even for games at home, I used to get them to give me spelling tests and sums to do. So I was always interested in doing more. There is a little dictionary at home on which I have written all over "I want a dictionary", with dictionary spelt about 10 different ways on it. I was a very dedicated child.

I stayed with the Presentation nuns right through secondary school and that gave me an even greater opportunity to do all the extra-curricular activities. I did a huge amount of debating, both in Irish and in English. And I always got involved in school musicals. We did Bless the Bride, where I played an awful part of a girl called Millicent Punctuality, and we did the play Riders to the Sea for the Tipperary one-act drama festival - I played the part of Maura in that. I also did a lot of public speaking and debating.

We went to the Gaeltacht on three-week school trips during the summer, which was smashing, really. We spent our time at the cΘil∅s with the boys from C≤lβiste Chr∅ost R∅ in Cork, except when we were in fifth year, they were in second year, so the balance was wrong somehow. So we weren't quite able to get up to mischief. It might have been different if the ages had been the other way around, but I think it was probably organised that way for a reason.

I went boarding in the convent because my father, being in the Seanad at the time, was spending a lot of his time in Dublin, but he didn't want me to leave the school I was in so I went boarding there for the last three years of school. That opened more extra-curricular activities for me, because they did more sport, more basketball especially, even though I was never really sporty. I made more lasting friends there because I was living with them all the time.

It was around that time that I started getting heavily involved in politics. When I was in primary school I remember canvassing the nuns for Fianna Fβil. But when I was getting more active myself, the sister in charge of the boarding school, Sister Alice, used to allow me out to cumann meetings in the town. I was in school when I spoke at the first Fianna Fβil youth conference. They encouraged all of that. They kind of knew that was the direction I might go in, but it was quite unusual I suppose to be allowed out of a boarding school to attend a political meeting.

I always wanted to teach and from the time I began teaching I loved it. But at the same time I was doing the political stuff and all the debating and the public speaking. Then when I went on to college I was very interested in political work and I set up the first branch of Fianna Fβil, which was the first political branch of anything in Maynooth.

I wanted to teach second level, so I did Irish and history in my degree, but at the end of my first year I was trying to decide whether to do my degree in Irish and history or whether I would do Irish and Celtic studies, so I rang Sister Alice to ask what she thought and she said, "Oh you're going to be a politician, so you'd better understand your Irish history." So I took her advice and I've never regretted it.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly