It was the only school in Ireland, remembers Dr Cormac MacNamara, where you were taught the 19-times tables. For Dr Garret FitzGerald, it was a first opportunity to mix with members of his own sex. It was where the film producer Michael O'Herlihy learned to shoot rabbits.

No two people's memories of Colaiste na Rinne, it seems, are the same. But all agree on one thing: time spent there was never dull.

This enduring institution has been attracting students to Ireland's smallest Gaeltacht, Ring in Co Waterford, since 1909, and it shows no sign of going out of fashion. This summer another 1,200 12- to 18-year-olds will pass through its doors. As well as the summer courses, the full-time Scoil na Leanai continues to attract up to 150 pupils each year who use Ring as a stepping stone between primary school and second level. Children are sent to Ring for a variety of reasons, says Maire Ni Cheilleachair, the principal of the school, who has watched them come and go since she began teaching there in 1954.

Some pupils are the children of returned diplomats who want their children to catch up on their Irish before going to secondary school. Many are the sons and daughters of former pupils who have happy memories of their own time at the school.

While the schoolyard games of old like hopscotch and "cowboys and Indians" are no longer in vogue, "kids in general are more or the less the same," says Maire - "though they are a bit more open now and less shy than in the past".

Participation in sport has always been encouraged at the school and the construction of a new sports hall is to be the next phase of a redevelopment programme which has cost £2.5 million over the past decade.

The school would still be recognisable, though, to the likes of Garret FitzGerald, who attended as a full-time pupil in 193536 and returned for three Easters. "It was rough and ready," the former Taoiseach recalls, "but I enjoyed the interaction with the other boys and girls.

"I didn't like the food, and I ate very little . . . but I learned how to polish my shoes and make my bed and, of course, I learned Irish." Corporal punishment was part of the regime, as it was elsewhere, and he received questionable advice from an elder brother - who had been to Ring before him - about how to handle the punishments. "For some reason he told me not to show distress at being hit. Then the other boys said I mustn't have been hit very hard. It was an early lesson that you can't win."

Unlike many students, who mix with members of the opposite sex for the first time in the Gaeltacht, FitzGerald had attended an otherwise all-girls' private school in Bray before going to Ring, "so I met members of my own sex for the first time". One girl in Ring proposed marriage. "I replied by asking if I could get her a cup of water."

Cormac MacNamara, the former president of the Irish Medical Organisation, was there at the same time as journalist Vincent Browne in the mid1950s. His mother had attended the school as an adult and four of his five children have been there since.

An abiding memory for him is of toasting bread, attached to the end of a ruler, against a range. "For 15 years afterwards you would meet people with the burnt end of a ruler and you'd know they had been in Ring," he says.

An occasional highlight was the Sunday cuirt, or visit by your parents, who brought you to Dungarvan for a lunch of consomme, chicken and bacon and a choice of desserts - jelly and ice cream or sherry trifle "which never saw sherry". Invitations for friends were secured in the hope of them being reciprocated. "The real movers and shakers worked the system so that they'd have an invitation to lunch every Sunday."

Donogh Diamond, a reporter with RTE's Prime Time, had his first kiss in Ring in the summer of 1976. What he remembers most, however, is the nightly escape from the Rosary. "It was like no Rosary we had ever heard before - it had millions of prayers. We used to sneak out and sit in a cornfield."

The food was poor and the chips were scarce. "Everyone would count their chips, and people would spit on them to make sure no one else ate them." But he enjoyed his stay there: "The ceilis were good crack and I thought the beach at Helvic was the most beautiful place on the planet."

O'Herlihy, who left Ireland for a career in Hollywood, had his "first contact with racism" as a Dubliner in Ring in 1939. But his year there was "one of the best things that ever happened to him", he said in the introduction to Letters from Irish College, a book published by Marino four years ago. "I had to fend for myself and I won in the long run."

Six decades on, children at Ring are learning to do the same. "This place gives them great confidence," says Maire Ni Cheilleachair. "They learn to stand up for themselves."