IN JUNE 1990, Veronica Dunne's pupils - past and present - held a tribute concert for her in the National Concert Hall to mark her retirement from the Leinster School of Music and Drama, Griffith College, Dublin.

At the end of the evening, Veronica was invited on to the stage. A recording of her singing I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls wafted through the air as she made her way to the stage. Those who were there will testify that it was a very emotional experience, listening to her magnificent soprano voice and witnessing her students acknowledging their immense gratitude to their singing teacher Dr Dunne - or Ronnie, as she is affectionately known.

Veronica Dunne was always more than just a singing teacher. She has spotted talent and told singers that she wanted to teach them. She often gave lessons for free, so keen was she to develop voices. But that is only the starting point. She has taken singers into her home, found them jobs and even handed them plane tickets to compete abroad.

"We're put on this earth to help one another," she says. She has not only trained their voices, but also groomed them into fine professionals. She has made sure that the finishing touches are covered, down to the tiniest of details, like deportment and table manners. That evening back in 1990, the students made £20,000 from the tribute concert. They presented the cheque to Veronica. And that's where the story could have ended. Ronnie could have shuffled off into retirement and enjoyed blowing the money on bingo or a world cruise. Instead, she gave the cheque away; she gave it to the Friends of the Vocal Arts, a charitable organisation, and together they set up the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, with the aim of giving young singers a start.

The first competition was in 1995. Over the years it has grown and many of the competitors have gone on to great things. Past winner Miriam Murphy recently wowed the crowds in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in Macbeth and came first in a prestigious Wagner competition in Seattle.

The fifth Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition takes place from January 19 to 25. Competing this year are six tenors, 22 sopranos, and many baritones, basses and mezzos - some coming from as far as Mexico to compete.

If you want to support the competition, there's a gala dinner to attend, a bank account to fill and, of course, you can witness the world-class singing talent for yourself by attending the competition during the heats in the Freemasons Hall and then the final in the National Concert Hall. But back to Ronnie.

So many people have their own stories about Veronica Dunne. "She's such a lady," one photographer said recently, having met her. On hearing this, Ronnie laughed and said, "Hel-lo?"

For Veronica Dunne is many things, but 'lady' is not the first word which springs to mind. She is an immensely good woman but she is also very strong-willed and sometimes formidable. "Are you sure you're not pregnant?" she asked one tenor when she felt he hadn't pulled his weight.

And there are days when the 79-year-old can curse like a trooper. "I swore I'd give up cursing, but sometimes f**k is the only word that'll do," she says.

Or after the Placido Domingo concert in the Point, she said, "I wouldn't charge him." (And I don't think she was talking about singing lessons.)

One minute she is as earthy as Mae West and the next she tells you that the morning after her performance in Opera Ireland's The Queen of Spades back in 2002, when she learnt Russian for her comeback role, she went up to the church and donated all the bouquets she had been given for the altar. She is religious but, as she says herself, "I don't eat lumps out of the altar rails. I am religious in my own way, in a very quiet way. Most singers are religious. It's extraordinary. It's a gift from God."

And then there's her laugh. It's there with her infectious sense of fun and energy. (She still works six days a week, from 10am until six, sometimes seven.) "I don't take a lunch break because if I'm on a roll I have a sandwich and I go on teaching. I love it. I don't realise the day is gone. When you get somebody in the raw the first thing you have to do is spend hours on technique - and I do that, all the donkey work.

"It's great to create something from nothing. You help them be what they want to be and then you say goodbye and wish them good luck. I'm so proud of them."

But didn't she retire in 1990? She did, but shortly afterwards she began teaching again in the Royal Irish Academy and Griffith College. "'When I retired . . . ' are my famous last words," she says. "I think if I didn't work I'd start digging my grave." Instead, she keeps going. And boy, does she go; up early in the morning, curlers in the hair every day, immaculately groomed, fresh clothes. Last year, she took up t'ai chi.

In Veronica Dunne's world, there is no time to stop and stare. But it was always so.

The soprano's story is well known. She grew up on the Howth Road in Dublin, the youngest of three. She was immersed in music and horses. Her father was a building contractor who kept racehorses. She had two ponies and went hunting four days a week. There were many musical evenings in the Dunne home.

"Everybody sang or did a party piece. It was part of the culture. They'd sing The Heart Bowed Down and everybody would join in for the anvil chorus from Il Trovatore, all operatic, then Gilbert and Sullivan and Noel Coward.

The Hills of Donegal was Veronica's party piece. But by the time she reached 11, her parents saw her potential and sent her to Hubert Rooney for singing lessons.

She admits that she was a tomboy and quite wild. At 13, she was expelled from Eccles Street convent school for repeating a harmless verse to the mother superior - it was a verse about babies, which she didn't understand. Veronica's father was so furious with her for disgracing the family that he didn't speak to her for six months.

"I thought the verse was awfully funny because it didn't mean anything to me. But still nobody told me. They never told me. When I went to Italy to study singing, Monsignor Flaherty [who was helping her] said, 'If you're caught with an Italian you'll be sent home.' I remember going in to see Joan Fitzpatrick, who was a nurse in Rome - she'd just had her appendix out. I said to her, 'When you have a baby, do they use the same incision to take the baby out?"

At that stage, she was 20 and had been two years in Rome but she still didn't know the facts of life.

"I challenged my mother afterwards and she said, 'Darling, the rosary every night saved you.' I said to her, 'A lot of bloody good that was. I don't think you realised how good-looking those Italians really were and my hormones were very high.' Oh my God, when I think of it! But I did behave myself because otherwise I would have been sent home, and I wanted to be a singer."

And a singer she became. She trained in Rome and went to the opera, often seeing a young Maria Callas perform.

"I heard her in 1947 for the first time when she sang in Italy with Mario del Monaco. It was unbelievable, this wonderful voice, even from top to bottom. She was very fat but she was tall and could carry it. She was a very nice woman." Veronica would go backstage religiously to have Callas sign the programme. "You again?" the soprano would say, smiling. Years later she said the same line to her in Covent Garden, to which Ronnie replied, ¨Yes, but this time I'm here singing."

She went on to sing with Joan Sutherland and Kathleen Ferrier and still talks of the time when, as a dying Mimi in La Boheme, she ran her fingers through the tenor's hair, only for the hair to come off in her hand. It was a hairpiece.

In 1953, when her career was getting established, she married businessman Peter McCarthy. They had two children, Peter and Judy.

"I was determined to have a career. I'd worked too hard to get there and I thought it was possible to have a career, get married and continue with the career. I don't think my husband understood what my world was like and what it entailed. He couldn't understand that I couldn't go to a dance the night before a performance, but I would go to please him sometimes. I took terrible chances.

"It's very difficult to be married, bring a family up and have a career. Something has got to give - and it did, later on. He met somebody, which is understandable. We had drifted apart. With my being away so much, he had made his own life."

And then there was the guilt of leaving her children, as she headed off to sing in London; then coming home laden down with toys from Hamley's, bought out of guilt.

In the end, torn between family and her career, Veronica decided to stay home to be with her children. Later on, her marriage ended and she found a teaching job to support herself. Some years later, her husband came back to live in the family home.

"I found it very hard to forgive," she says, "but I did. You can forgive, but you can never forget. I think every woman should forgive because when one forgives you cure yourself. You become your own person. I think he was sorry for what he did and he suddenly realised that the values of life are your family and grandchildren. He wasn't a well man when he came back to me, and then he died."

These days Ronnie still enjoys life. Her Christmas present to herself was a French manicure and she is all geared up for seeing fresh talent in her singing competition.

Veronica Dunne is her own woman but still there is one person she has to answer to: her daughter Judy. The roles have reversed.

"I'm scared stiff of her. If you've got a cold, she thinks you've got pneumonia. 'You've got to go and see about yourself,' she'll say. She's really very strict. She's so like my mother," Ronnie groans, and then there's that lovely laugh again.

The 5th Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, January 19-25 (early stages 19-23 in Freemasons Hall, 17 Molesworth Street, Dublin). Black tie fundraiser dinner at Dublin Castle on January 24, €250 (phone 01-416-3384). Final in National Concert Hall, Dublin, January 25, 8pm (phone 01-417-0000, see www.nch.ie). Cheques can be made payable to the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, Griffith College, Dublin 8

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