New European Parliament president Pat Cox was always focused during his Limerick schooldays.

I remember little enough of my early days in Dublin in the convent school in Walkinstown and then Drimnagh CBS, but from the early mornings I remember Sister Agnes - who was perhaps the head nun, I'm not sure - but certainly she maintained a stern discipline in having a line to go into the school. That would be one of my early memories, of the military-style discipline of the line. That was very early days.

My sense of place in school - because I spent more of years there - is more associated with Limerick. I moved and did the balance of my primary from second class to sixth class in St Munchens National School in Hassets Cross in Limerick.

There was a certain air of excitement in moving down to Limerick. My father was already working in Shannon Airport for a few years and had been saving to move the family down to Limerick so I was excited that the family would be together again - more so than being excited to start a new school.

My memories of the school are quite fond, though. It was a new school that was opened in the 1950s on the north side of Limerick city, serving a whole new catchment area of houses that had grown up out on that side of the city. When I got there in the 1960s there were still quite a few Christian Brothers working there. Brother Casey was teaching me in the second class - I remember a practise he had that I don't recall from the school in Dublin of doing a spelling test at the end of each week. I remember studying difficult spellings, as they appeared to me at the time, with enormous intensity.

The school had a very strong focus on standards. When we went into fourth class some of us were grouped together for a scholarhip class because at the time I was in primary school you still paid for secondary and all the local authorities had these scholarship exams which would pay one's fees. It involved extra tuition after hours over a period of several years from fourth to sixth class so it was a very focused thing. It was a lot of extra work for certain, but I wanted to get it.

There was one old Brother there who was in retirement called Brother Murray. Brother Murray had been the head brother in Sexton Street CBS and had the foresight to buy the site of the school I was now in. He was an absolutely brilliant teacher and I recall him because he appears in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. There's a little stretch in the book when his mother brings him up from the lanes where he lives and they knock on the door of Sexton Street and Brother Murray slams the door in their faces. It's a very chilling part of the book because the closing door is the closing of opportunity; it's exclusion, it's marginalisation; it's all those things and I only take it for its face value, but in my own experience what Brother Murray did for me was to open every door. In the end I got the scholarship for the secondary and there was quite a few in the class that did. It was a very well-prepared group.

I went to what was a new secondary school called Ard Scoil Rís. At the time we felt a great pride that we had the most modern laboratories in the world, certainly in the universe of Limerick education. The thing I most recall from secondary school was being involved in school debating teams. One didn't know it at the time, but it was a very good grounding exercise for some of the things that came later. In terms of gaining public speaking confidence in front of an audience, it was great. I wouldn't have been directly conscious of it, but in retrospect all those dimensions add up.

My father died when I was in school. The morning he died I had to go off with someone and help to pick his coffin. I was 16 and you do a lot of growing up - and very fast - in a circumstance like that. I suppose there are different options - you could go completely off the rails or just stay on track and stay focused. My own sense after he died was that if I was going to get by then I'd better get by on my own account and that was an additional reason to stay focused.

We used to have school on Saturday morning and before my father died lunchtimes on Saturdays was mostly when we'd have chats - because during the week he was out at work and meal times didn't overlap. So I can remember at lunchtime on Saturday my father always emphasising the worth of staying focused on education as the key to getting on. There was that kind of motivation at home and then the school environment was very supportive. The combination made it easy enough to enjoy the experience.