I CAN REMEMBER quite clearly my first day at school. It was 1951, and I was four years of age. I remember walking the mile from my home to school with my mother and my older brother and sister.

In those days children could start school at any time - I've no recollection of anyone else starting that day. I felt isolated and quite terrified. In rural Ireland you met very few strangers, and one mile down the road was the big wide world.

Ballydrehid National School was a tiny, rural, two-teacher school, three miles west of Cahir, Co Tipperary Junior and senior infants and first and second class were taken by the mistress, Mrs Ennis. Third, fourth, fifth and sixth classes were taken by the principal, Dennis McGrath, a native of Donegal.

There were only 40 pupils in the school and no more than five or six in each class.

In my early days, I would have preferred to be anywhere else but school. It was very disciplined and you had to sit all day on a seat, with chalk and a blue slate. School was a bit of a culture shock - I was a country child and was used to spending my time running about in the fields.

Facilities were poor. When I started in school, I don't think anything had changed for almost 100 years. There were only two rooms in the school, which were heated by coal fires lit by the older children. Later the building was modernised and heated and we got proper toilets and hand-basins.

The curriculum was basic and narrowly based. We studied English, Irish, arithmetic, geography and history. Geography and history were the subjects I enjoyed most - they gave me my first opportunity to learn about the world outside Ballydrehid, though I knew a lot of local history from my parents and grandparents.

We were slapped fairly regularly, from high infants upwards, and as we grew older we were subjected to the cane but it was probably well deserved - we were wild and difficult.

I believe the influence of national school is more important than that of home. The way you're treated at school by your teachers and peers has a huge bearing on your self-esteem and how you develop as an adult. Children can be labelled, and a put-down can have a devastating effect - teachers don't realise the damage they can do to people.

Both Mrs Ennis and Mr McGrath died shortly after I left national school, and I've always regretted that I never had the opportunity to talk to them as an adult. It would have been interesting to look at things from their point of view.