I’ve just finished watching World War II in Colour on Netflix. Some light relief from the COVID-19 news! I’m not joking. I found it fascinating viewing and now I have moved onto a blockbuster documentary about the Vietnam War. Compelling.

I had just turned 17 when I sat my Leaving Cert in 1990. My only memory of that summer was Italia 90

This is real history and I learned more about World War II over a few nights than I did in five years of secondary school. I had just turned 17 when I sat my Leaving Cert in 1990. My only memory of that summer was Italia 90. I don’t remember a whole lot about the Leaving Cert except to say that I didn’t get the points to study journalism in Rathmines College. I’d more chance of getting medicine in Trinity; such were the points required for Rathmines.

Instead, I did an interview to secure a place on the broadcasting and journalism course in Ballyfermot Senior College. The interview, combined with a portfolio of articles I had written during work experience in the Cavan Leader, and my Leaving Cert points, brought me across the line and onto the two-year diploma course.

She did this despite even the dogs in the street knowing that it was never going to go ahead

Three decades on and it will be a combination rather than a straight Leaving Cert points tally that will secure third-level college places for many of the 61,000 students who were due to sit the exam – my daughter included. Right up to last Friday’s announcement that it was being cancelled, she was on a Zoom maths grinds call. She did this despite even the dogs in the street knowing that it was never going to go ahead as long as people were still contracting COVID-19 in their hundreds. There were complaints that the students had been left hanging and, like everything else, during the past eight weeks or so, the keyboard warriors knew more than the experts.

But I thought Leo Varadkar was very clever in saying last month that the Leaving Cert would be completed “(come) hell or high water”. It kept students studying on the outside chance that an exam of sorts would go ahead. The intervening weeks were obviously spent by all stakeholders and legal advisors, social distancing in a room, to work out a feasible alternative.

This is 2020, the year of the pandemic

And they have come up with one. Naturally, you will never be fair to 61,000 people with a one-size-fits-all solution. This is 2020, the year of the pandemic. There is nothing fair or equitable about it.

I asked Deirbhile how she felt. She is pragmatic and confident that she has been consistent enough in her work to achieve her college goals. Still, I have mixed emotions. I am relieved that she now knows there will be no exam. I am sad that she will have missed that rite of passage like the two generations before her. And I’m now anxious about what results await her. But I certainly will not be harassing teachers or kicking up a storm.

spare a thought for the responsibility which has been handed to teachers and school principals

Students and their families are under pressure. But spare a thought for the responsibility which has been handed to teachers and school principals. I appreciate the implications and the conflict of interest this presents, particularly in rural Ireland, where there will be perceptions and paranoia on all sides that will run deep and shape lives forever more.

We must get on with it

But this is a year like no other. We must get on with it. And I would love to know how, 100 years from now, the Netflix history documentaries will document and explain what exactly happened to us all in the year 2020.

On the same side

It makes for dramatic headlines, pitting farmers and the Green Party against each other. There will be extremists for whom never the twain will meet. But truth is; Irish farmers have more in common with green goals than given credit for.