I was born and reared in the house where I now live in Dunboyne, Co Meath, and for the first couple of years I went to the local national school. I was happy to go off to school, I was an only boy with five sisters, so it was great to get down with the gang. Dunboyne was very small then but it was a great place.

Making my first Communion was a very big event - it had a big influence on my life. I realised for the first time that we were here but there was someone else there guiding us and helping us as well. It was a strange thing knowing there was someone else there. All my sisters went off to the convent in Eccles Street in Dublin and after two years in Dunboyne, so did I. I think a lot of the reason I was sent there was I was cursing and swearing and not just learning Irish and English in Dunboyne, so I was sent off to town with the girls.

I was in Eccles Street for just a year, then I went into Belvedere. I enjoyed Belvedere enormously even though I've only been back in the college twice since I left it nearly 40 years ago. The friendships I made then, from Sean Byrne to John D O'Brien, have remained, and yet we never really socialised all that much in school because I was out in the sticks. But it's amazing how our paths crossed over the years.

I'd say I was in a scrap every day until I was about 14. I was probably a nuisance, because I loved fun and playing in the yard and messing and wrestling and I was fanatical about sport. I couldn't get enough of it.

I had no interest in the academic side - I was nearly allergic to the books. Father Roche was rector of Belvedere at the time and he called my mother in and said, "I don't know Mrs Boylan, Sean seems to have difficulty learning" and the country woman that she was answered, "Well what are you going to do about it?" Her way of thinking would be, "We sent him here to be taught."

We had a farm at home and my mother and father were very practical and always felt I'd come home to work on the land. At 14 or 15 years of age, it was time to move to fresh pastures and they wanted me to be good with my hands so after third year in Belvedere I went the Clogher Road vocational school in Crumlin. It was a huge cultural change because I was coming from what you would call a privileged society to people who would have been far less well-off but hugely decent. I loved working with my hands. I found it a fantastic change.

I also found another change. Jim McCabe was a PE instructor and he had won an all-Ireland with Cavan and every Wednesday we had Gaelic football and hurling. I was absolutely mad into the hurling and Paddy Phelan who taught metalwork played for Tipperary, so I was in my element. This was the more important part of the education for me.

I did two great years in Clogher Road then I went off to Warrenstown agricultural college. It was a most wonderful experience. I hadn't given much thought about why I was going there it was more what I was told to do. I had two career aspirations. I wanted to be a priest - I was mad into the Cistercians - and I wanted to be a doctor, but I wasn't doing the work I should have been. I was six weeks in Warrenstown and the rector, a man called Father Collins, met me in a shop in Clonee, and said "Sean, are you getting these old traditional cures from your father," because my dad would have been well known for the herbalism within the county. "You'd want to make sure those remedies are not lost," he said. He spoke to Brother O'Hare and I ended up doing three days a week agriculture and three days a week horticulture so I would have a knowledge of the plants. He was a very far-seeing man.

One night in the college - it was the end of May 1961 - I rang home and my dad answered the phone and I realised it was the voice of an elderly man for the first time. I got a shock, it was like a wake-up call and I started to think about things in a way I never had before. I rang home again and said, " I'm not doing the exams, I'm coming home" and all he said was "very good". I went home to learn from him. That was the extent of my formal education at that stage, but it developed me a lot as a person, having mixed with the different societies in the different schools, and it has left me with fond memories.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly