Dylan Thomas once wrote: "the memories of childhood have no order and no end". Childhood, for me, is a big misshapen bag of used baler twine. Reach in and pull. You emerge with one tiny string, one little isolated memory, or you pull out a big bunch of entangled twines, a big rigmarole of memories "fite fuaite le céile".

I was born in Sallymount, Mackney, at the back of Burke's filling station. My parents had both been nurses in the local Mental Hospital; she was from Sligo, he had moved in from Kilasolan, Caltra. One of my great grandfathers died in Boughill, Ballygar in 1848 from Famine fever. Before long we moved down to Dunlo Hill. School started for me in the Convent of Mercy. Sr. Anthony, Sr. Ciarán, Sr. Assisi, as someone said to me years later: "Lovely women swaddled in celibacy and sanctity." Bringing an odd penny down to help save the Black babies is about all I can remember from those years.

The monument stands beside our house. When I was young the monument was surrounded by trees. For us youngsters 'twas a magic Tarzan land. Here we yodelled and climbed, swung and explored, played Cowboys and Indians. People said that Clancarty's dogs were buried there, but the monument's inscription tells us it was erected in honour of the Hon. Charles Le Poer Trench.

First Holy Communion meant fasting from midnight. Television, that beguiling little monster, which nowadays mesmerises and permeates our lives, hadn't arrived; the Town Hall (once again being renovated in 1988), then called the Plaza Cinema, was our Mecca. Four pennies would get you into the Sunday matinee. There our heroes were all action men Cowboys - Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Jonny Mack Browne and a thin innocuous, wishy-washy wimp who later matured into John Wayne. Flash Gordon died every Sunday in the serials and inveigled us back the following week for his miraculous resurrection. Weren't we naïve and innocent.

Then there was the Fair Green, Páirc an Aonaigh. (If you're looking for an account of the "Grin" in the 1920s, read An Lomnochtán by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc). It ran from Church Hill to the Duggan Park wall and the Show Grounds; the Hut, an ex-British Army men's Club, and the new Scoil Ghrealláin were the only buildings impinging on the Green's twenty or more acres originally Paul Dooley tells me. Sadly (and read Seán Larkin's poem) much of this has vanished.

I've always been conscious of Scoil Ghrealláin. I live overlooking it. School life in Scoil Ghrealláin was casual and uneventful and I can't say I was influenced by any teacher until Tomás Ó Meadhra arrived. Long, lean, lanky and wicked, exuding a sort of benevolent menace, tugtha don Ghaeilge. O'Meara prowled the corridors of Scoil Ghrealláin, inspiring and frightening. When I reached sixth class O'Meara took me under his wing, walloped me and entered me for the Garbally Scholarship. Bhí m'athair taréis báis agus bhíomar bocht dearóil. Reams of Grammar, English and Irish! Great dollops of Macbeth ("Is this a dagger that I see before ..." is still evocative) were memorised. Paidín Mháire, Eoghainín na n-Ean, M'Asal Beag Dubh (now providing problems for third level students) were part of the prescribed scholarship course. Great strips of History and Geography were devoured. I got second in the scholarship, people thought I was a genius but it was really O'Meara's scholarship; I was only the instrument to raise Scoil Ghrealláin from its jungle status. This initiated the scholarship era in Scoil Ghrealláin and the system was continued under Pat Carney. The scholarship became, for many, the Gateway to Garbally. Later as a teacher here I spent a number of years myself gearing lads for scholarships in various colleges: Garbally, St Mary's, St Jarlath's, Roscrea, Summerhill and Gormanstown. But back to Ballinasloe in the 1940s; the town itself seemed to be full of eccentrics and characters. First World War veterans who could yap about Ypres, Paschendale and Mesopotamia; fascinating people like Coffey Bradley, Ned the Head Carroll, Jack Guinessey, Mick Lillis, Pancake Ward, Captain Joe Fallon, Abbie Pepper, and Johnny Burke.

I was always Young Gantley even though I was really Ganly; there was a family of Gantleys living in Ballinasloe in those days. I even discovered in researching the roll books this Christmas that I'd been misregistered as the son of Joe Gantley from Woods' Lane.

Street lighting, not too bright by modern standards, was provided by the local gasworks down at the Old Grand Canal Basin. In many ways Ballinasloe has changed dramatically. Gone are shop-front names like Rafter, Connolly, Cullen, O'Rourke, Mahon, Armstrong, etc.

The monthly Fairs which tortured and refertilised the Fair Green have vanished. The Great October Fair Week - the Ballinasloe Man's Christmas - now survives more as a Festival than a Fair. Long gone are the days when almost 100,000 sheep and over 100,000 horses changed hands during the famous Fair Week.

After Coláiste Ghearrbhaile I moved on to St Patrick's Training College, in Drumcondra, and for a year or more I taught in a number of schools around the country. I was Principal for about a year in Authwillan, outside Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim. Here my best friends were the Gaffneys, one of the daughters, Mairéad Farrell, was murdered by English SAS troops in Gibraltar. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam dílis.

Soon I returned to teach in my old alma mater, Scoil Ghrealláin. I've been so deeply involved with Scoil Ghrealláin that for me the whole complex is just one large echo chamber of the past: every corner, every nook, every cranny, every crevice tells a tale.

The bishops who visited Scoil Ghrealláin, usually for Confirmation: Bishop Philbin, an uppity little man later Bishop of Down and Conor; Bishop Ryan, talk hurling and you had him in the palm of your hand, even though he had and I thoroughly disagreed on a few occasions. Bishop Cassidy, a plámásar and I'm not using this in any derogatory sense. He had a wonderful way with a class and, as they say, "He would make words stand on a stick." Bishop Kirby, le teacht.

Occasions like the time we climbed Croagh Patrick led by the sockless Fr Geraghty. The jubilation felt by the whole school when Joe Connolly and some of the victorious Galway Hurling All-Ireland team visited Scoil Ghrealláin in 1980 and again in 1987, when Conor Hayes brought the McCarthy Cup in once more. Let's make a habit of it, Cyril.

Teaching, of course, is a very fragile thing. How can you quantify intangibles or abstractions? How can you measure the future? Teaching can be profoundly important; the repercussions of what you teach may reverberate way into the future. A teacher can, unintentionally perhaps, destroy a youngster's confidence or again a teacher may inspire or stimulate; teaching is not just a matter of punching out the facts and figures. Teachers and pupils should be on the same wavelength and the same teacher can have contradictory influences on his pupils. For me Tomás Ó Meadhra was a charismatic figure. "He was a monster", an ex-pupil of his from Ardrahan once told me. ( An bhfuil tú ag éisteacht, a Fhinín?)

Much of my teaching within the confines of the curriculum has been instinctive. 90 percent of the pupils of Scoil Ghrealláin are like myself, natives of Ballinasloe. They're part of me and I'm part of them. I can empathise with their faults, their frailties, their talents and their abilities; they're learning from me, but I'm also learning from them. I've always remained relatively immune from the arcane academic jargon and gobbledygook o the professional educationalist ensconced in verbal obscurities, e.g. Socio-Technical Analysis of Lifestyles as a Source of Inputs.

I'm more at home in the real world of Brackernagh, of Derrymullen, of Hymany, of Pollboy, etc. Many people look on primary teaching as being a soft job - saol an mhadra bháin, lovely long holidays with pay - and are inclined to smile disbelievingly when they hear teachers talk about stress and strain, of being burned out and exhausted. However, lock yourself in with 30 or 40 active young lads and try to organise for them a programme of activity, of creativity, of learning, of discipline, and of supervision.

School life is basically a microcosm of life outside: a sandwich, alive vibrant and humorous inside but encased and smothered inside slabs of repetitive tediousness.

One smiles, chuckles and remembers: Pat Galvin and his ash plants; "To be of not to be" becoming "to pee or not to pee"; Forty days on Croagh Patrick being answered as forty days on Cleopatra; An bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an Interloo?; Don't mind that lad whinging over there, he's only got a dose of the haycaps; "Ár nAthair atá ar Neamh" rendered as "Ár Knackers atá ar Neamh".

"You were magic for me, Jimmy Burgoyne", "You're only a hedge schoolmaster, Jimmy Murphy"; Bilingualism: "If you're late amárach I'll leave you outside the doras"; Peter Finnerty's definition of growing old: "If you sit down you're in the way, if you stand up you're in the light". The Prodigal Son is now more often the Prodigal Father; "A wind from the South with a honeyed mouth"; He made a dirty face at me. Too far East is West! Johnny Hurley, How the Brackernagh Footballers became the All Blacks; Numeracy: "I won't tell you once, I won't tell you twice and I won't tell you a second time." "When all beside a vigil keep" becomes "When all beside a virgin keep".

I'll finish by misquoting Patrick Kavanagh: "St Grellan, you've burgled the bank of my youth."