With the school's current principal listening in the background, Carol dives into a story about a game of dares played at the back of the classroom when she attended the school, and about the one and only time she ever ended up in the principal's office. Not as a child, but as a parent.

Amanda and Carol Schneider are both past pupils of the school, both mothers of children currently on its rolls, and Amanda has also worked there for the past seven years. Their conversation shifts between past and present, between their own memories of the classroom and the things they now watch their children experience.

Asked what Shinrone is like on a good day, both land on the same answer: hurling. Carol, who lives just outside the village, describes the atmosphere of match days, when the quiet of the surrounding countryside gives way to "a buzz", more people walking, more people stopping to chat, a friendlier feel to the place. Amanda points to a specific moment so many people from Shinrone bring up in conversation - the county final win: "There was a great buzz for weeks and weeks around the village. The pubs were great crack at night time, there was music spilling out onto the streets." What made it for her was the effect on older people in the parish: "The older people were so, so happy. The smile on their faces - that was a really lovely thing to see."

Both women single out the arrival of new communities as the biggest change in Shinrone itself. "We've embraced more communities, more cultures here in Shinrone," Carol says. "We've lots of different nationalities here in the school, which years ago when I was in school here, it was all Irish people in school." Amanda describes the same change from a slightly different angle: "more kids walking out of the school, more people in the shops, just more people that you wouldn't recognise, whereas one time you would know everyone." She welcomes it: "They're bringing something different that we wouldn't get to see or know if they weren't here."

To the two women, the school itself feels remarkably consistent. The building is much the same, Amanda says there's been an extra corridor and an extra pitch, but the fundamentals have not shifted. "I can place all the teachers where they were in all of them," she says about her own school days. "It's still the same great community that it was when I was in school." A breakfast club and after-school club now run from early morning until six in the evening; Grandparents Day brings older family members into the school. "That wasn't available when we were kids," Amanda says, "but it's a great thing to have now."

For Amanda, having her children in the same building as her workplace is something she genuinely enjoys, though she is careful to set boundaries. "I'm not going to let on I hear anything that's going on in school," she says. "I don't have much involvement in the class they're in. It's in and out - whatever they tell me, they tell me." Occasionally, if one of the boys catches her eye in the corridor, she cannot resist a whispered are you listening?

Carol's one and only visit to the principal's office came not as a child but as a new parent. Her eldest son had come home in wet clothes after playing in the field, and at a parents' association meeting she had raised the issue out loud, asking another parent how the spare-clothes rule worked. Word got back to the principal, Caitríona, and the following day Carol was called in. "Caitríona was a little bit... I won't say cross," she recalls carefully, "but she got her point across to say, we are the first port of call." The lesson landed. A spare change of clothes went in every day from then on, and the issue never came up again. In the background, Caitríona gave an eye over as though to say she couldn't recall.

What makes the story worth telling is how it turned out. When Carol mentioned to her elder son that she was coming in for the interview, the conversation at home turned entirely to Caitríona - how the two of them got on, how good she had been to him as a boy. "It kind of gave me goose pimples," Carol says, "because it was just, it was brilliant." Her son is now in his third year of college, having passed through secondary school since leaving Shinrone, and Caitríona remains his favourite teacher. "That's the truth," she adds, plainly.

For Amanda, whose family moved from Roscrea to Shinrone when she was eight, the school's lasting gift is the friendships formed early. "Everybody wants to be friends with each other when we're eight years of age. We all clicked straight away. It really is one of my best memories - just lifelong friends."

As for the dares and the kisses that came with them, that was, Amanda insists, as wild as it ever got. "Someone used to call the principal and he'd go down to another class and he'd come back maybe twenty minutes later. We used to love it. We used to play dares and that — but that was as wild as it got." She pauses, glancing back at Caitríona, then adds, with the slight panic of someone who has just realised she is on the record: "But let's not go into that." Some things, it seems, should stay in the classroom.