The butterfly floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair tanned face of June, the nomad gypsy, laughs above her widespread wares - That's all very well Frankie Ledwidge but you never had to sit the Inter Cert, never mind the Leaving. Speaking of which: Michelle de Bruin has suffered many humiliations in recent times but surely none so terrible as having her name omitted from this year's Junior Cert Irish paper. According to a teacher quoted in this newspaper, Ms de Bruin, "who has dominated every paper for the past four or five years, didn't get a look in" this time round. Instead, the mna cailiula in this year's paper were Caitriona McKiernan and Sonia O'Sullivan. This is daft. Ms de Bruin is surely more famous now than ever before. Is she to be excised from history, and the Junior Cert Irish paper, just because she is famous for the wrong reasons? Are we to forget her? Is that possible? If fame is the spur, what is infamy? Why can you only pass or fail a urine test, and not get honours? Answer any three of the above (40 marks).
Meanwhile our Irish Times student diarist and Leaving Cert examinee, Mr Darragh Martin, last week told us how his fellow-students felt on emerging from their first English exam: "Most seem happy, joyously proclaiming that within hours, they will never have to study poetry again." And on Tuesday, referring to the Irish poetry questions, he disrespectfully referred to the immortal bunnan bui of our schooldays as a "dead yellow bird". This reflects a very sad state of affairs. Studying poetry under compulsion is of course an abomination, but these young people should realise that it is possible to come across a decent poem now and again, perhaps even once a year. If they weren't already dazed by MTV, they would recognise such a poem by the fact that it leaves them punch-drunk with pleasure, and commits itself to memory with minimal effort.
As for the poor old yellow bittern, Cathal Bui Mac Giolla Ghunna surely deserves better. After all, when these Leaving Cert students conclude their labours and are limbering up for their night on the town, they should remember that An Bunnan Bui is a paean to alcoholic drink by a man who knew what he was talking about. Wise and witty, with a powerful alliterative flow and a joyous open-hearted assonance, it is essentially an untranslatable poem, and in all of Irish literature it might well be the best argument for actually learning the language. Thomas Kinsella has nevertheless in his translation (The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse) got as close to its spirit as anyone could. He certainly puts across the poem's unanswerable logic: "Have ye not seen this smooth-necked bird that died of thirst a while ago? So wet your lips, my neighbours dear, there won't be a drop when you're dead and gone." Amen to that. All right. Now to the fraught Leaving Cert Geography question of where best to build a new bridge across the Shannon. Students were asked to "select a site" if you don't mind. They didn't think much of this, and they were right.
I have already questioned the minds and motives of the people who set examination questions. If you ask the Department of Education where these individuals come from, the usual coy answer is "from all walks of life", from which I infer they have been turned down by the French Foreign Legion. While at work, they are bunkered under the old Army barracks in Athlone for months, with no access to ordinary social life, so that eccentricity quickly becomes the norm, and is naturally reflected in the questions set.
However, even allowing for all of this, the Shannon bridge question beggars belief. In the first place, the Shannon is already bridged to a perfectly adequate degree, so much so that you could almost jump your way, bridge to bridge, down the entire length of the "lordly" river. Indeed, it would be relatively easy to construct a narrow wooden walkway, linking the bridges, without any supporting structure necessary. Then one could "walk" the Shannon all the way from Leitrim to Limerick, and even do a little bit of fishing on the way without the need for a boat.
It is also clear that the enormous political, social and economic considerations of another Shannon bridge have never entered the examiner's head. We will return to this another day, and to the question of whether it might not be better to remove most if not all of the Shannon bridges, in order to keep tourists out, stem the flow of human traffic eastwards, and encourage the few remaining residents of the West to stay where they are.
