The students who are this morning embracing the fact that their school days are over are facing into a world very different from that of their predecessors of the past decade. Exam celebrations were at the time often excessive and the thought that there might not be an opportunity for them in whatever sphere they chose was not one that was uppermost in the mind.
They leave the cocoon of school and the security that goes with that status and enter a country that is in fear, that is knowing unprecedented uncertainty, that now realises that maybe it has seen “as good as it gets” and that it may never see such prosperity again. They see their parents stressed about mortgage repayments, about finance, they are seeing their parents unemployed for perhaps the first time in their young lives. Homes are different. Parents are battling hard thinking they have let families down, when it is they who have been let down, picked up and tossed about by the incompetent running of this country for a decade.
It would be so easy for students to get caught up in the maelstrom of depression and recession that is currently swarming around this country.
However it is vital that they do not. When last Irish students went into such a work environment, things were much bleaker. When we left school in the 1980s, third level college was not a certainty. Indeed, in my school, the CAO application forms were only offered to the brightest and to students from particular areas of the town. Needless to say, not too many of them went home in the schoolbags that came to my street and the streets around.
It was a different world in which many of the Irish students were greenhorns who looked up at the tall buildings in awe. But that is not the case anymore.
Young people nowadays are so much better equipped to deal with the world and its challenges. While they may not be au fait with the real value of money and the real importance of material things to which they have become accustomed, at least they have a knowledge and a confidence that their counterparts in the 1980s did not. We did not know what a cappuccino was, we did not holiday abroad, we did not eat out — nowadays such things have become the staples for the students who leave school this year and who grew up in the tiger years.
So as you depart your school years today with your Leaving Cert result, or even those of you who go back for more, remember that just because life may not be the same as it was in the tiger years, this does not mean it will be bad. Because of what we learned from the tiger years, perhaps we will become more caring. That era created much wealth in Ireland, but it also created a whole layer of insufferable nouveax riche assholes who illustrated that you can take Paddy from the bog, you can’t the take the bog outta Paddy.
Leaving Cert success does not mean that life will be a success. It might ease the path, but the path to fulfillment is within each of us and sooner or later if we try hard enough, work hard enough, respect people enough and have cop on and commonsense, we will the find the path that brings us the contentment that life is supposed to. To all you who did the exams, may you choose well in your life direction and may your years ahead, be, above all forms of materialism, very interesting.
