October 1993, University College Dublin
After three years of toil, and some fun along the way, I walked across the improvised stage in the UCD Sports Hall to pick up my parchment from the powers that be, with my proud parents in the audience.
Reward for a decent effort at the Bachelor of Commerce, albeit the big day somewhat tainted by an arm in a sling ... but that’s another story.
October 2025, Dublin City University
Thirty-two years later, I’m back in a university hall, this time the Helix Theatre in Dublin City University. With a 21-year-old son, one might expect that I was an onlooker as my eldest picked up his parchment.
Well, I might have to wait another 12 months for that special family day. This time, my brother and I were sat in the second to front row as our father ... stop, that reminded me of something:
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Our Father, Who aren’t in heaven,
fallow be his mane;
The essays come, they must be done,
in Word and sent to Glasnevin.
Okay, back to events in the Helix. We looked on as he was about to take to the stage to collect his reward from a five-year Bachelor of Arts in English and History. He was the oldest swinger in town on that particular sunny afternoon on Dublin’s north side.
He graduated with an honours degree at the ripe young age of 82 – first up on stage that afternoon – “very appropriate to be the first to receive his parchment”, I said to my brother. It felt like I’d gone full circle, from upstart 20-year-old picking up my own degree to proud child seeing my dad do the same thing. Then the university president gave him a shout-out in his speech, followed by sustained applause from all and sundry in the hall.
Without a doubt, this was one of the proudest moments of my life. I had the pleasure of seeing my late mum graduate from UCD with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology when I was 14, only to follow it up with two Master’s degrees in the succeeding three years. But, for her own reasons, she chose to sit out the three conferring ceremonies.
So, this time, I got the opportunity to publicly express my profound pride in my dad’s achievement. He was feted in the lobby afterwards: “You’re an inspiration”, “congratulations” and “unbelievable” were some of the comments from his fellow graduates and their families.
The whole event gave me pause for reflection on the power and importance of education.
Not forced down my throat in my house growing up, but my parents subtly pushed the education narrative in my early years. I took to it like a duck to water. Then, in 1984, my mum openly showed the importance of a solid education when she forced herself down the third-level path without even a Leaving Cert to egg her on. As a young fella, I equated a solid education, including university, as a means to get a job, any job, at a time when the unemployment rate was 25 per cent for young men.
After my dad’s conferring, I thought about the three educational periods in a typical life:
- Child and Early Adulthood – a time to be soak it all in, get through school and university and position yourself to get a decent starting job in your chosen field. Short and sweet, but not simple. Thankfully, access to the full array of education has now broadened out from just the privileged few and is generally available to the full gamut of society;
- Mid to Late 20s – this is a time to ingrain yourself in those early jobs and also complement the university education with postgraduate and/or professional qualifications. For me, it was securing a Chartered Accountancy qualification – this stage of your career offers a myriad of opportunities to further hone your skills in your chosen profession;
- The 30s to 50s – this time is when all of those qualifications are used to develop real world skills – more a case of learning on the job than sitting in the classroom, but no doubt a significant part on your educational journey.
Then, in your 60s, you retire. Right? Sit back, count the pennies and the blessings and start to enjoy the most precious of all commodities – time.
However, while sitting in the Helix Theatre watching my old man strut across the stage, I thought of a fourth period of education, one that is perhaps overlooked and undervalued – post-retirement education. Maybe not education to position yourself to financially capitalise on the qualification, but learning for the pure fun of it. Choosing a field that you might have chosen when you finished school, but weren’t brave enough to take on. Maybe because insufficient financial rewards would accrue from such studying or maybe because you weren’t mature enough to realise what you actually had a passion for.
This made me think that as the grey population inexorably moves towards retirement, partly as a means to make way for the next generation, it certainly doesn’t mean that those in that age group are fit for the scrap heap. Perhaps they can further themselves in learning, this time an education of the soul rather than simply the mind, as Newman would espouse.
Perhaps that generation can help guide the younger folk in their class, using their maturity to provide perspective to those too young to have a broader view of their chosen field of study.
Perhaps the old folk can show that you’re never too old. Never too old to achieve anything. Never too old to learn new tricks. Never too old to smile. Never too old to walk across a stage in front of a thousand people. Never too old to interpret a poem from the 1700s.
Never too old to openly show the importance of education to their grandchildren.
Never too old, full stop.
