There was a teacher in Dundrum National School in south Dublin who had a ruler and she used to crack us over the knuckles with it. I can still remember her even now. That was my first school, a red-brick building near the police station in Dundrum. I lived in Goatstown and I used to walk to school every day over the railway bridge, below which the steam train used to pass. I remember the last steam engine that went on the old Bray line - we were all out standing on top of the bridge as it went under.

I went to Dundrum for the first few years then I went to St Mary's National School. It was a Christian Brothers' school attached to Oaklands College, in Kilmacud. It wasn't all that bad, though I do remember getting quite a few belts from the leather strap on my hand.

I spent about five years with the Christian Brothers. Probably the biggest disappointment of my life came when I wasn't able to get into the Oaklands secondary school. There was an entrance exam and I didn't pass muster. I really wanted to go because it would have been a natural progression to go on to Oaklands for secondary education. So what happened was I had to spend another year in sixth class, trying to find out where I would go, and I went back to the Dundrum school for that.

Free education came in at that time but I still couldn't make it into Oaklands. Then my parents found a place called Sandymount High School right beside Marian College. It was run by a man called Cannon and it was a co-educational school, with mainly Catholics who went to it. You could put your hand out and reach across and touch Marian College. Somebody said John Charles McQuaid built it deliberately beside Sandymount High School because he didn't like the idea of this more secular place in the heart of Ballsbridge.

It was a strange, interesting place, a two-story building with no corridors. You had to be in school at 8.30 a.m. and you finished at 1.30 p.m. and there were no uniforms. It was fee-paying, but it wasn't very expensive - though it was probably expensive enough for my parents.

Sending me to Sandymount High was probably the best move they ever made. I enjoyed it. For its time, it was very progressive. People who couldn't make it into the better-off, toffee-nosed secondary schools around Dublin ended up there. It had a mixture of good and bad teachers - all of them lay teachers.

I became the auditor of the debating society, which was a great honour. We would go off debating with other schools and we were well up on all the issues of the day.

I was interested in English and current affairs. I was happy enough in school and I wasn't someone who didn't want to be there, but I just wasn't a good pupil. I probably wasn't a good studier. I was always active though, working away doing odd jobs. From the time I was eight, I was delivering newspapers before I went to school. Then in secondary I was delivering shoes and working for the local chemist, delivering prescriptions and things like that.

I was always doing other things, which I suppose detracted from my school work. I remember the first book I read outside of school, collectively with a group of other students, was Lady Chatterly's Lover, which was banned at the time.

And, once, half the class took the day off and went on what we called a "mass mitch". I learnt to drink as well, in secondary school, in the pubs in Ballsbridge. We tried to pass for 18 after rugby matches, and we got away with it a little bit.

To me, education is tremendously important but I don't believe exam failure should hold anybody back. I've always firmly believed that life is not just about passing exams. While they're important and I would encourage everyone to do them, never feel that if you don't get exams you can't go off and do something else. I failed my Leaving and Inter, basically because of maths. If there was one regret, it's that I would have loved to have gone to university but, not having a Leavng Cert, it didn't happen, so I just went off into the big wide world.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly