".....In our family business, as in so many others at the time and since, the eldest son went into the firm, and this had been my destiny since birth. My brother was only eight at the time of my father's death and in the fullness of time was to earn an excellent degree at Trinity. While reading for his PhD, he was invited for interview with Guinness, for the privileged position of junior brewer, which had traditionally been filled exclusively by Oxford and Cambridge graduates.

I was born in a Hatch Street nursing home (known appropriately as the Hatch), in the street in which I now work, on 25 September 1937. We then lived in a house called Glann in Gordon Avenue, Foxrock. I have distant memories of playing in the river that flowed through the bottom of the garden. In 1941 we moved a couple of miles to Abilene, a dilapidated farmhouse on the Blackrock side of the Bray road. The house was then in a very run down state, almost uninhabitable, and my grandfather Harry Wheeler is reputed to have commented that he would not have his daughter live in such conditions. ...."