‘‘I was born in Strabane, County Tyrone, at the end of the war. I lived there for the first years of my life,’’ says Riverdance co-founder, John McColgan, who is in fine spirits as he approaches his 80th birthday in September. ‘‘My Granny McColgan raised me while my parents moved to Wexford. When they were settled, they sent for me. I was four by then, so I did make strange. There were nine of us, six girls and three boys. We lived on a farm owned by the O’Toole family, and it was called Ballingale.

‘‘Mrs O’Toole was the lady of the house, and, as a little boy, I used to follow her around when she was feeding the hens and pigs. I was always asking her questions. I would say, ‘What colour is that, Mrs O’Toole,’ and she would say, ‘Duckety grey … like a mouse’s diddy!’

‘‘They took me out on the tractor when they went lambing. I developed a deep love for the earth and the farm. I remember earning my first money thinning turnips. The turnips were put into a drill close together, and you had to go on your hands and knees, with sacking around your knees, to thin them so that the strongest seed was set every six inches.

‘‘I got two and sixpence a drill, and they were long drills. At lunchtime, Mrs O’Toole would come out with the lunch. There were glass Lucozade bottles with stippling at the top. The tea would be in there, all milked and sugared. I loved sitting in the ditch, eating with the other workers, and listening to their stories. I would eat my slabs of brown bread and country butter.

‘‘The next time I earned money was when they grew strawberries. It had only just started on this farm. We were the first to grow strawberries, and I earned money picking them.

‘‘I loved Wexford, Mrs O’Toole, Seamus, and Josephine. Josephine, who was a few years older than me, brought me to school when I was four or five. She used to talk about movies and theatre. The first live play I ever saw was Josephine in the Pirates of Penzance, staged in her convent in Tullow. I was enchanted by that.’’

Little could young John know back then about the massive role that theatre – and in particular a show that would become a global smash-hit stage production – would play in his life many years down the road.

‘‘My love of theatre began in County Wexford in the Tombrack Parish Hall. I knew I wanted to be an actor.

‘‘We had no light and no running water in our bungalow in the early years. We had oil lamps. My job was to clean the soot from the globe with paper. Then, with great excitement, the electricity arrived.

‘‘We had a big bulb in the outside yard, and I remember Mrs O’Toole saying, ‘Don’t look at that, it will cut the eye out of you!’

‘‘The principal of the school in Tombrack, Mr Lynch, ran a drama group, and he also did magic tricks. It was wonderful. I remember singing in the cathedral in Enniscorthy with the Tombrack choir led by Miss Baker. My father was the manager of a leather factory in Ferns Castle. It was with sadness that I left Ballingale, Tombrack and Wexford, but it was exciting to go to Dublin. My father got me into Saint Joseph’s school in Fairview.’’

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own