You can't beat that post-Leaving Cert feeling

The start of the Leaving Certificate always brings a flurry of comment. On the day it all begins, with English Paper I, the Leaving is the talk of the place. The media is full of it. People everywhere give a shudder at the memory of it. There is a level of obsession about the whole thing.

In so many minds, it remains the passport to the future, no matter how much the opposite view is offered. For all sorts of historical and cultural reasons, we feel that most acutely in the West. Where privilege isn’t common, people hang on to ladders by their fingernails.

So the talk drags out for days. It extends onto radio talk shows; social media lights up with it; wherever coffee is sold it comes up. The minutiae of exam scripts are discussed more than the weather; studied more than Holy Writ; examined more closely than the curriculum. The questions about them become an Oral Exam all of their own. Was that a fair question? Did such and such come up? Was it a balanced paper?

The students have hopefully had their headphones on during these adult interrogations. In fairness they have prepared well for that during the teenage years. But this is one occasion where you could not criticise them for keeping those giant headphones firmly glued to their heads. They have spent the last few weeks slogging through the tunnel. One exam after the other, on a wide range of very different subjects, stretching every mental sinew. It’s a graft, even in the subjects you actually like.

All that would have been bad enough without everyone wanting to discuss the papers, wanting to know how they went. When it is from a family member, your support crew, it is very understandable. But when it comes from elsewhere, students are quick to learn that all these enquiries are more often than not only a prelude to hearing a story about how awful it was for that person. And when these stories end with the clincher that the Leaving isn’t the be all and end all, the student learns the valuable lesson that the art of self-congratulation can come in many forms. But they haven’t had time for such stories and such lessons: they’ve had Maths Paper II.

Everywhere for the last few weeks it has been Leaving, Leaving, Leaving, and now it is Ending, Ending, Ending. The last exams of Leaving Certificate 2024 take place this week. On the last day, which gets a lot less attention than Day 1, you could have sat Japanese, Politics and Society, or Arabic in the morning. Notwithstanding the fear that I would be one of those characters telling stories about my Leaving, none of those options – alas in at least one case – was available to me in 1994.

Later on, on the afternoon of the Last Day, you could sit (appropriately enough) Religious Education or Applied Maths. Which of those two you picked to study would be a matter of choice between faith or reason I suppose. Roman Catholics would tell you that there is no reason you cannot combine the two.

But such abstract reasoning aside, now the students are out the gate. Anyone who went through the experience can remember vividly the moment they handed the last script up and walked out the door of the exam centre. Actually, you didn’t walk out: you strode out, and you didn’t think too much about how that stride was only the start of a much longer journey. We all know well the West of Ireland story. Brought up at home, and then you move away, with only a chance you will come back. It is a tale as old as time in our part of the world. It can be told in an inspiring or baleful way. We have heard both, in story, song, or verse.

But in late June, with high summer ahead, we can leave off that talk for a while. The young people who walk out of the gates of their schools for the last time in these days have one glorious summer ahead before that tale starts its first chapter – the last summer before a great change.

There will be a temporary job of some kind for those who are planning to start college. They will be helping on a building site, or working in the kitchen, or waiting tables, or sitting awkwardly in an office not knowing exactly what to do. There will be a farmer who needs a hand, or there will be that most wonderful of jobs, delivering goods to the businesses all around the region. A great friend of mine had that job in his summer before college. He was out on the truck, delivering drinks to the pubs of the region. The mention of it now still makes him smile.

For others the world of adult work is on the horizon. Apprenticeships soon beginning; a start with a company or business – growing up will come quicker for some. But whether the work is temporary or more permanent, let’s hope the money earned will allow for a season of enjoyment. With the exams finished it’s so important they have a good time after all their efforts. It’s equally important that everyone who cares for them enjoys those young people enjoying what might be the last summer in the West.

They will live in bright colours, relishing the long summer evenings, those days when the brain and body are churning like never before, and – trust me – never after. With a bit of luck, the summer will be full of the best kind of adventure, playing sport, having fun, and learning some of life’s nicest lessons. There may be – for the fortunate – a trip abroad to a sun destination. 

Let us not dwell too much on the details of what happens on such trips except to say two things: in a positive way to remark that we were all young once; and secondly, to ruefully remark that it was not Costa del whatever for us. That isn’t to say that there weren’t high jinks back in the days of the Island of Saints and Scholars; they just didn’t require as much sunscreen.

It will also be a time for high emotion. There will be relationships and first love and all the drama and excitement that goes with that, not least the anguished concern about what will happen when one party goes to one place in September, and the other to another. That is all part of experience too, as the former school students stand on the threshold of their potential. The world will grow big and open up in front of them and for all our sakes let us hope that they will pepper it with idealism. As they move onto that next stage, the emotions will extend to those who know their chicks are going away into the big world, and feel very bittersweet about it.

But that is a few months off yet. For now there is a summer for swimming, and parties, and planning, and thinking and all the things that are – in truth – never lost on the young. Whatever their Leaving Cert results may look like, we all hope that the young people get full marks in living their best life in the summer of 2024.