I have a friend who has six WhatsApp groups for every one of her children

Idoubt too much thought went into where I went to primary school. I was sent to the nearest one to my house. It just so happens that I loved it. But my parents didn’t know that then. Its geographical location was its main selling point. This was 1990s Ireland, when co-ed schools were scarce on the ground, and I had two brothers. So there was going to be a bit of toing and froing at drop-off and pick-up time, but at least I could walk myself to school, without having to cross any main roads.

Before I had children, I presumed proximity was always the deciding factor. I knew there was a secondary school hierarchy, and that fee-paying schools and feeder charts existed – although this only became clear to me when I went to university. I remember being at a Trinity College party with a school friend who had just started there.

Someone asked us where we’d gone to school. I was surprised by the question.

This lad knew we were from the opposite side of Dublin to him, how could he possibly know all the girls’ schools in the greater north Dublin area?

When we told him, his face went blank. ‘Is that for boarders?’ he asked. A few more of these interactions and I realised that, in his world, there was a finite number of schools, all fee-paying, and that anything outside of that – including my very nice, very free public school – didn’t really exist.

But that’s secondary school. For primary, at least, I assumed it was almost entirely a matter of geography. And then I had children of my own.

Mine are still too young for school, but I am preparing to apply (parents of older children – don’t panic on my behalf, the rules have changed, and you can now only put their names down one year in advance).

As such, I regularly find myself speaking to friends and strangers I meet in playgrounds about where their kids go and if they like it. I have also been hearing the tricks of the trade. The parents who list grandparents or aunty and uncle’s addresses as their own in order to fall into the catchment area of their desired school. Or the ones who admit to a certain amount of poetic licence when applying to gaelscoileanna. Do they speak Irish at home? They absolutely do – they just don’t necessarily mention that they only do it when they don’t want their offspring to understand what is being said.

Yet as outlandish as some of the lengths might seem, when you find out your own local school has record-breaking levels of oversubscription, you start to wonder if the dogged parents have a point.

Our nearest school – the one my kids could walk to without crossing a road – is among the most over-subscribed, if not the most oversubscribed, primaries in the country. Two years ago, it received 12 applications for every available place. So for every child that got a ‘yes’, another 11 got a ‘no’. That is Hunger Games levels of competition.

Even though the current rules mean you can’t apply until a year in advance, one woman phoned the school so often on behalf of her notyet-one-year-old that the secretary had to tell her to cease and desist.

In my book It Could Never Happen Here, one parent takes a job at the primary school in order to secure a place for her son, only to quit as soon as he made it to the Halloween break of Junior Infants. There is a group of mothers – mostly former students – who take their roles as ‘Parents of Glass Lake students’ extremely seriously, and spend their free time lobbying, fundraising and holding decision-making coffee mornings. If you want your child to be on the football team or in the school musical, you better believe you are pulling up a chair and ordering a flat white.

The idea of having to be so involved in your children’s school terrifies me. Where are you supposed to find the time? Surely, we should trust the highly competent teachers, and leave them in peace to do their jobs. Even the idea of all the WhatsApp groups makes me start to twitch.

I have a friend who has six WhatsApp groups for every one of her children. There’s the standard class group, the school trip group, then there’s all the extracurricular activities – each one requiring its own individual message thread. If this is what modern parenting requires, please take me back to the good old days of landlines and a Chinese whispers ringaround when the pipes froze and the school had to close for the day.

Stuck in the present, however, I will be sending application forms to every school within walking, or possibly cycling, distance of our house and hoping for the best.

It Could Never Happen Here by Eithne Shortall is published by Corvus and available now

For the mums who love dreamy dining, Tara O’Connor’s Daisy Jaipur tablecloth design looks right at home with some chilled róse. €75, thedesignedtable.com