The Cedar Lounge Revolution

It seems to sneak up on me every year. Fumbling with take-out coffee and the morning’s paper while waiting for the bus I turned to the headlines and there it was: ‘Leaving Cert results’. The story, on all the frontpages, dealt with declining results in some maths and science subjects but for me, and probably anyone reading it who had sat through the exams, it was a reminder of what we were repeatedly told was the most important event in our lives.

To this day my short walk along the corridor to the School Secretary’s office to collect my results remains one of my most terrifying and nauseating experiences. Since then I’ve been in a couple of unpleasant situations where serious physical harm was a possibility, but generally there was no time to be scared and I have always been blessed with the instinctive coward’s ability to know where the proverbial fire exists are located in any room. This was different, the culmination of months, years, of work and steadily building tension.

For me, perhaps more than most, the results that morning were serious for it was the second time I had taken the exams. I had done a negligible amount of work the previous year, spending my time reading books that had nothing to do with the school curriculum and had missed out my first choice by some distance. I was offered instead a degree in public administration somewhere outside the pale. The road less travelled I suppose. Had I taken it, I’d never have met Mrs Little, never have ended up working where I am and I suspect wouldn’t have got so involved in politics being too busy administering people.

But instead, I chose to give it one more try and transferred to a new school. After the first day of classes I walked out to discover my father had, unusually, taken time off work to give me a lift home. On the way, he pulled into a lay-by and we had what was probably our first serious conversation as men. There was no lecturing or pleading or commanding, as marks the relationship of father and son for the first two decades, more a quiet conversation about the year ahead and how important it was for my future.

And so, after a summer of sleepless nights and ever-increasing anxiety after the exams were over I looked forward to the day when the results would be there to be collected. This was long before the post Leaving Cert celebrations consisted of a week in Ibiza, or wherever it is the young people go these days.

It was about half ten when we pulled into the carpark. There were a couple of other cars around, a few students going in or coming out. I ran into a girl I knew who was struggling to restrain her excitement as she came out. We exchanged a few words but it was clear her mind was on what she had achieved and the need to tell her family. She wished me luck and in I went.

The corridor from the main entrance to the secretary’s office was relatively short. Industrial, dark green carpets and cream walls dotted with religious imagery. Cushioned backless benches along the right hand side and a short queue of nervous men and women, boys and girls, waiting for their results. Curiously, I can’t remember faces. Those of the people I queued with and must have spoken to, or the school official who handed me my results, yet everything else that morning prior to the results is extraordinarily vivid even today.

I remember sitting on one of the benches with the calculator to hand adding up my scores. Astute readers will note the fact that it took me three attempts, despite my fine electronic adding device, to get my final results and accurately conclude that neither Maths nor Physics were where I was hoping to get my points.

It was enough. Not enough to be comfortable. A sudden spring in popularity for my first choice course and I might still lose it, but I thought it was enough, and so it proved. I don’t remember walking out of the school or telling my parents or friends. I don’t remember what we did later that day though I suspect it was a quiet family dinner someplace.

I do remember the two people credited with getting me through it. Ma Little was, and still is, a great believer in St Martin de Porres. Despite my atheist leanings at the time I had carried a St Martin’s medal into every exam, feigning reluctance as a good atheist should, but drawing comfort from rubbing the smooth surface of it with my thumb throughout the examinations nonetheless. I kept the medal up until my third year in college, a lucky talisman of sorts. This, and a couple of rosaries from my Mother, is the case for St Martin’s support.

It was my fanatically Marxist friend, whose committed Stalinism had a formative influence on my political development at the time, who argued that my success had been an example of an ‘historical inevitability’, assuring me that he had had as much confidence in me getting my results as he had in the inevitable collapse of capitalism. He attempted to make what I can only assume through a hazy recollection were spurious efforts to put my examination results in a Marxist context. In his defence, and mine for taking him seriously, we were both very drunk at the time.

This morning, around 50,000 young people will collect their results. Some will go straight to work, others to university and many to something in between.  For some, blighted by poor opportunities, today’s results will make little or no difference to their lives. The collection of the results is in itself an academic exercise. For others, it has the potential to be a defining moment shaping the rest of their lives for like most of us the career we take or the friends we make are to a large extent shaped by the university opportunity we had.

And for me, every year, it is a reminder of how a young person can be so utterly convinced that one’s entire future is contained in a series of letters and numbers spelling out the rest of my life.