Yes, I can see it all so clearly now

I was driving through Mullingar the other day and down this stretch I saw the lane that leads down to the Presentation Convent…

I was driving through Mullingar the other day and down this stretch I saw the lane that leads down to the Presentation Convent, which is quite close to the cathedral in Mullingar. It's a very strange thing but I had a vivid memory of my mother leaving me there to go for my first day of school and I got a bit of a shiver.

I was terrified, petrified and horrified. It was a feeling of dread that I was going into a dark tunnel of the unknown that led to a place full of people, or children, or whatever they were, I wasn't to know - it was just a place full of strange things and suddenly I was cast away as a small child into this horrible abyss of loneliness and fear.

The second day wasn't a problem at all - I was dying to get there. I was grand when I got settled in with the nuns and I had a wonderful time after that.

It was mainly a girls' school, but girls and boys started their schooling there. After a year or so, the boys went on to St Mary's, the national school on the other side of the cathedral.

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I found St Mary's another shock. I had become used to the nuns with the girls and boys all mixed and suddenly you walked into a school full of boys and male teachers and Christian Brothers and it was a whole new world again. It was daunting for the first couple of weeks until you got your head used to a teacher shouting at you rather than a nun being nice and placid, with her "are you all right, dear". The baby stuff was gone at this stage. I was still a small boy going in there and looking at the bigger lads coming out. I was sort of terrified of them. However, I got on well with my classmates and I got on reasonably well with most of my teachers, or as well as you can get on with them.

I might have been a bit of a mischiefmaker, but I never mitched a day from school. The trend was to mitch like hell. There was a renegade element in the school of which I was never a part. I avoided choirs like it was going out of fashion. I wouldn't take part in any of that stuff at all. When it came to auditioning for the choir and the plays, I made sure I was the worst actor and the worst singer in the class. I did my best to get out of it because I used to play a bit of hurling when I was a little lad and I was more interested in getting out and hitting a sliotar than being stuck in class on a Saturday or an evening after school when you'd have an extra hour's choir practice.

I loved geography. I was taught it by brother Fitzgibbons. He was only with me for one year and I reckon I learnt more about geography in that year than I've ever learnt since. He had a great way of putting it over and I remember moving on to another class and the new teacher's thing wasn't geography and I felt sort of left out and a little lost.

I then went on to St Mary's secondary which was the real big-boys school. But most of my friends were going to the technical school, so I stayed for a year in the secondary then I insisted that I go to the technical school.

I was rooting around with the guitar at that stage and my brother Ben - who was a carpenter and is now my band leader - made a guitar for me. I knocked around with that for a couple of years and saved a few pounds and bought a guitar. So it was in the technical school that I developed a thing for the music. We had concerts and the school encouraged you to take part rather than telling you had to.

Basically I was from the country and country lads tended to stick together quite a lot - which meant that you weren't involved with the townies. Not saying that all the townies were a bunch of cowboys, but you were never involved with that sort of townie element where you'd go up town after school and hang around the arcades.

I was basically a good boy, but there were a couple of nice girls living up the road and a gang of us would meet in the evening time a mile and a half outside of the town and we'd have our own fun at the crossroads, a bit of a sing song and all the things that kids do. I was probably warned off by a few girls' parents, but that's only natural and my mother used to warn me off seeing particular girls at the same time, but that didn't stop me. I was always happy to go my own way.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly