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Barry Keane talks about his childhood in Dublin, where he walked everywhere and played football on the street. He attended a good primary school with women teachers who taught Irish mythology and singing. He didn't enjoy school overall, but liked history and tennis in secondary school. He accidentally got into acting and enjoyed the experience. He decided not to pursue it as a career and wanted to travel instead. He has fond memories of Dublin being vibrant and enjoyed looking out the train window while traveling along the coast. Hello, so in my podcast I'm going to talk with my dad, Barry Keane. Hello. Hello, Carolina. Okay, so my first question is, could you tell me more about your childhood in Dublin? How did you see Dublin when you were small? Oh, that's a very good question. I grew up in the centre of Dublin, so I went to school in the centre of Dublin. Everywhere was a walking experience, so I would walk around Dublin quite a lot. I'd walk to school, walk home from school. When I met my friends, we'd normally go for a walk into town. And what else? We used to play a lot of football on the street, of course, and kind of children's games. We used to do a lot of chasing and that type of thing. How do I remember Dublin? It was a very vibrant place. There were markets, shops, open shops, so you'd have a shop and then it would have stalls in front of it. And you'd always be talking to people as well, so it was a very friendly city. Okay, that's very interesting. Can you tell me more about your education in Dublin? Because I definitely school was very different 40 years ago to now. Yeah, well, I mean, there are two types of education. There's primary school and the secondary school. So, primary school, I went to a school very close to where I lived. It's called Fink Street. It had a reputation for being quite a good school because a very famous guy called Gay Byrne had attended that school in the 1960s and he was a TV star. And so if Gay Byrne went to that school, then it had to be a good school. We were taught by the Christian Brothers, so it was a religious denomination, although I never had a Christian Brother as a teacher. I mostly had women teachers. Mrs Nagel, she would read to us Irish mythology. I learnt Irish mythology when I was seven and I still remember it today. So, that's thanks to Mrs Nagel. In third class, Mrs Cassidy taught us how to sing and I ended up singing in the school choir. Lots of Irish songs, that was quite funny. And then there was a basketball. Actually, it was a traditional Irish school, so you were supposed to play Irish games, which was Gaelic, which is like an Irish version of football or soccer, much older, of course, and Hurley, which is like hockey, much older. These would be thousands of years old. They were a little bit rough. They're quite contact sports. But there was another option, there was basketball and mini basketball, so I used to play mini basketball in school. Did you say that you enjoyed school? Did you like going there? I didn't enjoy school, no. I didn't enjoy Sainsbury's at all because the classes were very, very big. And the teachers were not the kind of teachers you'd have today. They were always in a really bad mood. And there was a great deal of emphasis on teaching of Irish and none of us really wanted to learn Irish because it was quite difficult. And we were from the city and Irish is really mostly associated with people from the countryside. So I did enjoy some aspects of school, sport, for example. When I went to secondary school, it was a much better experience because I liked history. I was very good at history and now I'm a literary historian, so obviously I found my areas of interest. And tennis, I was playing a lot of tennis in school as well. And I also got into acting and the school was very... Could you tell me some more about your acting experience? Well, my acting experience really came about as an accident because I was cast in a TV ad for a Rubik's Cube and I just got to know quite a lot of the people involved in the making of the ad. And I was told that there was an acting centre, dance centre, very close to my house because I lived so close to Dublin, everything was a five minute walk. So it was a place called the Dance Centre in Diggs Lane, which is off Georgia Street, which is basically, I'd say, less than a kilometre from my house. So I used to go down there maybe two, three times a week and I would do some acting, dance lessons and I got an agent as well, Gill Doyle, she was quite a famous actress at the time. And she placed me in lots of small parts for either theatre or cinema. And then I ended up, well, my school had a play every year and it was quite, for some strange reasons, because lots of schools put on plays, but this was considered quite a big play because it was held in a big hall. And I think there was about a thousand people came to it in two nights, so it was 2,000 overall. So it was quite a big attendance and so I was the lead of that. And I still remember the songs and the singing because, I mean, because we had to rehearse for about four months and it was singing and dancing as well and I really, really enjoyed it. I loved the experience of acting. At some point I realised that it wasn't going to be a career, but that I had really enjoyed it. It kind of ran its course with me. As I got a bit older, I felt I had less time and I didn't really want to be in Dublin during the summer. You see, you need to be around Dublin during the summer time for summer festivals and theatre festivals and a lot of movies are made in the summer and all that kind of thing. And I wanted to travel. I wanted to travel. And I wanted to go to university and I wanted to travel. So I wanted to travel in the sense that I didn't want to travel too much, but I wanted to go to Italy in the summers. So when I went to university, which was in Trinity, which was also in the centre of Dublin, but by that time we were living outside of Dublin, so I was taking the train in. So I had a great experience of Dublin and I have great memories of it being a very vibrant place. My education was quite traditional, I would say, although I have some very fond memories of school, particularly secondary school. It was a different school. I went to a place called Marion College, which I think you know is beside this big rugby stadium where Ireland plays rugby. It's called the Aviva Stadium. So I was right in the shadow of that. And it was a very interesting school because it had a mixture of rich kids and poor kids. So it was quite a democratic school, you know, which is really good, you know. Were the social differences really visible? You would, with the way people speak, because the Irish accent is quite, you can have a kind of a strong working class accent and you can have a middle class accent. You can be poor with a middle class accent, but at the same time, a working class accent really kind of defines you quite strongly. But was it like closed doors or like opportunities? It could, it could. Well, certain people will think that you're less educated, even though you're not. It's actually quite interesting. I was listening to, but things have changed because people, I do think Ireland has tried to integrate different, what would you say, areas of social classes. Yeah. So very often, for example, on a Sunday evening, for example, on Irish radio, there's a history programme and there's a girl with a really strong Dublin accent and she's always on it. And so what's an Irish, what's a Dublin accent? Well, very often you won't pronounce your T's. So, so, so, so, for example, she would say instead, if she talk about Vietnam and the Tet Offensive, she would say the Tet Offensive. And so things like that, yeah. Right. So this would be my final question. What is your like the first thing that comes to your mind when you would have to say a highlight of your childhood and the experience of growing up in Ireland? Oh, I think getting on a train. Getting on a train? Getting on a train, looking out the window as it goes along the coastline. So you can go either north or south. It was always a feeling of going somewhere special. Blackberry picking when you got there. So we'd always be going somewhere. So Dublin I loved, but getting on a train going down south of Ireland along the coast and looking out the window. I think they're really nice memories for me, I have to say. Okay. Thank you for the discussion. It's been a pleasure.