The past is another country

The Sisters of Mercy were responsible for my early schooling in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, and it was these formidable but kindly women who introduced me to the world of learning at the ripe old age of four. There were no electric showers, gentle reader, but mothers scrubbed their offspring until they shone. As clean as my childish conscience, I stepped warily up the hill of Templeshannon to the convent for my first day in the classroom, an elder brother grasping me by the hand. I remember a teacher with a long stick which had a dual function as a pointer and an incentive to orderly behaviour. At break-time a bigger boy said he would "beat me black and blue" for some unspecified offence. I had never heard the expression nor had I been physically threatened before. This new world was interesting, but scary.

I rather doubt that the term "childcentred education" was in use in Ireland at the time. There was an ethos which I find today only in parts of the Muslim world. There was Right and Wrong - and Right usually meant doing what you were told.

I was meant to move on eventually to the Christian Brothers' school on the other side of the River Slaney, but before this happened my father got promoted to station sergeant in the outlying village of Oylegate, where I was enrolled in the National School. As a "townie" in a country village and the son of a Garda, I found there were some barriers initially between me and the other pupils. But I remember a wonderful education, full of singing and stories, in addition to the three R's, with unspoilt rural Ireland as a backdrop. The proliferation of the motorcar means Oylegate is now only minutes away from Enniscorthy and Wexford town, but in those days it was in the heart of the country. Time did not exactly stand still but it moved at a stately pace.

There was a further culture shock in store. After a few years in Oylegate, our family moved to the Big Smoke: Dublin might as well have been Cathay. I was nine years old before I first saw the capital city, a wondrous place of double-decker buses, chocolate desserts, and coffee instead of tea.

Poor me: having felt "out of it" as a townie in Oylegate, I now became the country boy in a sea of city kids. There was an immediate academic problem: algebra was a new world of bewildering hieroglyphics. Crying didn't work, so I decided to get to grips with this strange new subject. Excuse me beating my puny chest but I recall getting first or second in the class a few months later.

As a pupil at Synge Street CBS in Dublin I remember the trappings of nationalist culture: sport, the language, a respect for the sacrifices and heroism of the past. But these were normal features in the life of a relatively young nation still finding its identity. There was never any suggestion that political violence had any contemporary justification. To the contrary, we were constantly reminded of the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill and told that enough people had died for the country, now it was time to start "living for Ireland".

Indeed our lives were enveloped in religion. Each night we wrote the Latin motto on our exercise books: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the Greater Glory of God). If pressed, I could probably still sing a Latin hymn or two, the legacy of many hours of choir practice. The Men in Black are less numerous now, I am told, but in those days they were everywhere. Discipline was administered by several slaps on the hand with a thick leather strap: it was a painful and upsetting experience and I still wince at the recollection.

I have good memories of Synge Street also. Sons of senior civil servants and labourer's children were treated the same: your brainpower determined your status. Despite, or perhaps because of, the stern disciplinary regime, there was an anarchic spirit of rebellion that found expression mainly through humour. Our way of coping with the vicissitudes of life was always to see the funny side and even now, when I meet certain friends from my school days, we automatically fall into the old routines and laugh again at half-forgotten episodes or perhaps just amusing phrases or expressions from our youth. There is a unique type of Synge Street wit and I believe it is no accident that Ireland's greatest comic writer, Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen, attended the school.

Deaglan de Breadun is the author of a new book on the Northern Ireland peace process, The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, which is published by The Collins Press, Cork, at £22.99 hardback and £14.99 paperback.