It was the spring of 1968, and there was something in the air all over the world, but we didn't know that at the time. Our school, Avoca, was agreeably laid-back and liberal, but rather dozy and myopic, rarely gazing beyond its south Dublin Protestant horizons. We were about to merge with another school, Kingstown Grammar - a promising development because it had more girl pupils than we had, writes Paddy Woodworth.
A debate was organised so that we would get to know each other. I was rather taken by several of the Kingstown girls that night, but it is one of their teachers that I have never forgotten. John de Courcy Ireland, with a name almost as exotic as his school's, spoke as I had never heard a teacher speak before.
He spoke with fierce intelligence and from enormous experience of the world - rare qualities in anyone, but potentially intimidating ones to a bunch of restless teenagers. No, it was his passion and his respect that held our attention. Passion, because he thought some things were important enough to get excited about them, and he was not embarrassed to show it. Respect, because he made each of us feel that we were important too, worthy of being treated like adults who had valid opinions of our own.
This respect for others was the single most remarkable thing about this most remarkable man. He held deep, and sometimes dogmatic, convictions about practically everything. But he never regarded his pupils, or anybody else, as blank sheets upon which his ideas could be inscribed. Though experience should perhaps have taught him otherwise, he treated each of us as though we were as intelligent, and as entitled to hold opinions, as he was.
He showed keen interest in what young people were really thinking - he was already in his late 50s - and he loved to be challenged. The only things that made him really angry were incuriosity and indifference.
I expressed my delight in our new teacher to a rather taciturn fellow-student from England. "He's certainly quite bright," my friend responded, "but don't you think he sounds a bit like a socialist?" It was the first time I had ever heard the word, and I don't think I ever heard Dr Ireland use it in class. But I recall the events of the French revolution coming alive before our eyes during the next year. We were preparing for the Leaving Certificate, but John Ireland was trying to prepare us for the rest of our lives. I remember the excitement of the notion that ordinary people could change the course of history - and the sombre warning that even the most democratic of revolutions could be betrayed.
It cannot have been easy to teach Irish history responsibly in 1968, when the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement was beginning to shake the foundations of the Unionist state. Two years earlier, we had been asked to celebrate the leaders of the 1916 rebellion. There was a poster of them in every classroom. They had seemed pompous, boring and irrelevant.
John revealed them to us as fascinating but fallible human beings, at odds with each other over what sort of nation they wanted to build, as well as about how to build it. This was a debate which, he liked to remind us, had to be played out anew by every generation.
The Northern conflict was bringing history alive in a different sense. John did not hide his outrage at the "iniquity" - he had the old-fashioned socialist's Old Testament moral confidence - of the unionist regime. But he also alerted us to the manipulative and sectarian side of the republican tradition, about which he had two archetypal stories.
The first was a comic melodrama, in which he was effectively kidnapped by the leftist 1960s IRA leadership, to give a history class to a group of volunteers.
"Secrecy and conspiracy is in their blood," he used to say. "It never struck them that I would have done it anyway, if they had had the decency to ask me straight out." The second story was darker. He recalled a 1940s Northern IRA leader telling him, in deadly earnest, that there would be "no peace in Ireland until every Protestant was at the bottom of Lough Neagh".
With the emergence of the Provos he saw a revival of that kind of thinking. He was a fearless critic of sectarian nationalism
of any colour, long before "revisionism" became fashionable.
I heard these particular stories when, like so many of his pupils, our relationship shifted to one of friendship after I left school. One of my proudest moments as a writer came two years ago, when a stranger wrote to tell me that he disagreed strongly with a column I had written about religion, but that "Dr John de Courcy Ireland's unique and unmistakeable voice comes across so resonantly" in it.
This reader turned out to have been his pupil 20 years earlier than I. He told me that John had just been taken into permanent care. Visiting him in hospital was not easy, as his powers visibly ebbed away. But he was as charming as ever, and still showed flashes of the old zeal. He thought he had failed in his last campaign, to organise his fellow patients in "progressive causes". But I am sure he touched the lives of every one of them.