Born in London to Irish parents, he overcame considerable difficulties with dyslexia in his childhood to graduate with a First Class Honours degree in Business Studies from Trinity College Dublin. He was winner of the Andersen Gold Medal in his final year at Trinity for an essay entitled “An Appraisal of the current innovations in the Money & Capital Markets”.

As part of his degree he took the Computer Studies option. While looking for a subject for his final year computer programming thesis he noticed staff in the Faculty Office trying to reschedule a lecture for a lecturer that was out sick. It involved manually checking all the subject lectures of all the students to reschedule to a date that did not conflict with their existing lecture commitments or those of the lecturer, to find a lecture hall with sufficient capacity for the rescheduled class and to avoid conflicting with any tutor sessions. He realised that he could remove the tedious, repetitive routine of this manual procedure using a computer application. He therefore designed and built an application written in Prolog called the Faculty Advisor (PDF doc:62.9MB).

During his time at Trinity he wrote for the Trinity News for Ed O’Loughlin (editor). He also wrote for the Student Economic Review (PDF doc:3.99MB). : He served as Students Union class rep for three years, organised the ESS Faculty Christmas Charity Concert, the Sunglasses Ball and ran a soccer league for his year.

In 1997 he organised the 10 year reunion for his ESS class in the Pav