Saint Canice's boys' national school in Finglas was an interesting microcosm of the development of Finglas. I began in low-babies in a little three-room school that was built in the late 1940s to serve the whole village of Finglas. High-babies was in a prefab attached to a mixed school with the boys upstairs and the girls downstairs. I then spent two years in a room under St Canice's Church which was a really strange experience - one could hear Mass going on and singing above. There was such a shortage of space and such a population explosion. I spent a year or two back in the mixed school and the last two years in a new purpose-built boys' school. The development of the area was reflected by the number of moves I made within the primary school.

Strangely enough I had the same teacher for six years in primary school, a man named Michael Donnelly. He got me interested in poetry at an early age. I had an interest, without ever imagining that I would become a writer one day or that it was worth writing about my own area or my own life. There was very little in the new curriculum to reflect the reality of life in Finglas or life in Dublin. So there wasn't any sense that literature had anything to do with where I came from or that somebody from Finglas could make literature. I remember saying to a fella in primary school who wanted to be a soldier that I wanted to be a poet and he said you couldn't be a poet unless you went to university. We couldn't think of anyone where we were from who'd been to university. Free second-level education was only just coming in, so I didn't imagine university would be an option for me.

I left primary school a few months early, after I did my entrance exam to Beneavin College, and I spent a very long summer at the age of 12 illegally working on a van dispensing ice creams to all the small seaside towns around north Dublin - Rush, Lusk, Balbriggan, Skerries - and to Butlins in Meath. It left me with a huge affection for other places. It was a wonderful adventure for a schoolboy. There wasn't a library in Finglas at the time and so I used to walk or get a bus down to Drumcondra library or else a small mobile library came. Years later I wound up working in the mobile libraries dispensing largesse of westerns or Mills and Boons to the populace of the very same seaside towns where I used to sell ice cream.

I then went on to Beneavin College in Finglas. I had written some tentative poems over the summer and I showed them to my new English teacher, Colm Hewitt, a very interesting free-thinking character. He read them and said they were very good. I said I wasn't sure if I'd be able to be a poet and go to university and he said, of course: "you don't need to, all you need is a pen and paper". That was a great liberation to know that anybody could write and there were no rules, no bounds, nothing holding me back from becoming a writer.

The poems I wrote were very much about the Celtic twilight. I used to get on trains and go down the country and look at cows and feel somehow more pure, more Irish for the experience. I was actually 15 or 16 before I met Anthony Cronin and he wised me up that my own life was worth writing about and the city was worth writing about. It's very hard to believe now when you look at someone like Roddy Doyle, whose success I very much rejoice in, the opposition there was to the notion of writing from the margins of the city. Ironically, as a schoolboy my poems about the countryside were regularly published in the papers but when I began to write about Finglas publication dried up very quickly.

As a small child I had a very bad stammer and I wasn't able to say 66 sneaky silvery snakes and that held me back a lot in primary school. In secondary school I was a late developer but I held my own academically. I founded an underground magazine with a guy called David Kavanagh, which was my very first publishing attempt. Beneavin was a liberal environment. They knew I was different and they gave me the space to be different. I've very good memories of the place - it suited me and my development and both schools made me what I am.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly