All is white and gleaming. Here be syringes, forceps, scalpels, drills, spittoons, solutions, moulding equipment. Enter the dental surgery. Be brave.

"You need to have a sympathy and an understanding of people's fears," says a calming Eamon Croke, who is ready to allay all your fears. Welcome to my world, he seems to say.

Like any city-centre dental surgery, the Croke surgery is quietly busy and clinically clean. He has a warm smile and a friendly manner. There are bundles of glossy magazines in the waiting room. It's another full day, kicking off at 8 a.m. and finishing, in theory, at 5 p.m. although Croke is often there until later. "The skills required in dentistry are not just the clinical ones. You need to have social skills," he says. "You also need to have skills in finance and administration. Communication has become such an important part of the job that students are now studying communication in undergraduate courses." This was not the case when Croke studied dentistry at TCD in the late 1970s.

Croke, like most dentists, is used to dealing with nervous patients. It's important to talk to each one to explain the procedure and "go through everything step by step. There's a fearful perception of dentists within the public which is often the first challenge we have to overcome. It's only after establishing a relationship with the person that you can progress. You meet the person before you meet the mouth," he adds.

Croke decided to become a dentist while he was still a teenager in second-level in Colaiste Eanna, Rathfarnham, Dublin. After studying at TCD, he graduated in 1979 and went to Britain immediately to work, "which is still the common pathway", he says. He worked in Sidcup in Kent for four years before buying his own practice in Bournmouth in 1984. In 1991, he did a oneyear postgraduate course in prosthetics at the Eastman Dental Hospital. He returned to Dublin in 1993.

"Dentistry has a reputation for being a stressful job. I think viewed correctly it's challenging." It's the mixture of medical expertise and the hands-on, people aspect that appeals to him. "I genuinely enjoy my work," he says. "To work long hours in an intensive situation you need to be able to enjoy it. Within dentistry you have the ability to achieve very, very high standards in all its disciplines, and the end result is satisfaction. You have job satisfaction at the end of the day." No, it's not repetitive, he argues. "That's completely untrue because every person is different. All daily work can become mundane if you don't have an interest in it," he adds. "What dentistry allows you to do is to build your practice in keeping with your interest, so that although I'm a general practitioner, I have a special interest, which is implants."

There's a huge National Geographic map of the world on one wall of his surgery. Some people like to focus on this as they lie back on the dentist's chair and wait for a procedure to get under way, he says.