There I was, on Thursday morning, sitting on the bed in the Gresham Hotel cursing and swearing at airport baggage-handlers who had managed in one fell swoop to completely destroy both of my suitcases somewhere between Malaga, Heathrow and Dublin.
At the same time I was admiring newspaper photographs of happy smiling Leaving Cert pupils who had got their wonderful results. Then Aine Lawlor's voice came over the radio on Morning Ireland with a story that suddenly put everything into perspective.
She told about a distressed mother who called the show on Wednesday night and left a message. Her beautiful son had come home from one of his Leaving Certificate exams last June extremely upset, convinced he had done badly, indeed sure he had failed, and as a result he had taken his own life. When the mother went to collect his results this week not only had he not failed the particular exam but he had passed with honours.
This is the sort of story most of us will have heard in one form or other. But we hear them almost in the form of urban myths - someone who knows someone who knows someone. And, of course, the stories surface just at this time of year and then fade from our consciousness. But these aren't myths, they're a hideous, if rare, reality.
Pressure from school, from home, from peers and the student's own expectations combine. Headlines before the Leaving Cert begins, declaring that this is the beginning of the rest of your life, or words to that effect, don't help. The emphasis on academic achievement being the be-all and end-all of everything, the total focus on results that pervades our second-level schools merely reinforce the pressure that is already being exerted elsewhere. An atmosphere is created that causes students to believe that if they fail to get into a third-level institution they should be ashamed.
To think that, after what for most students is 13 years of formal education, one's whole future is decided by what is put on paper during three hours is nothing short of criminal. I know we all talk about it at this time of year and then promptly forget about it until the same time next year. Ministers for education have come and gone; some have talked about change, some have even flown kites about the likely changes, but not one has really grasped the nettle, at least until now.
It looks as if Micheal Martin has the determination and the will to change the old order. If he manages to create a fairer, less pressurised exam system he will earn his place in Irish education and indeed political history. Not since Donogh O'Malley introduced free education and gave access to education to thousands who would otherwise never have had the chance would a change to educational policy have such a far-reaching and positive effect.
But there are lots of vested interests out there who will resist any effort to change the present system. We'll hear the usual cry of "What could be fairer than what we have now?" The response to that is: "Almost anything." What the current system tests is, for the most part, memory: not skills, not ability, not aptitude for particular careers, just memory and the ability to operate calmly under the pressure of regurgitating the data that the students have been accumulating for years, in a few hours.
I do not mean to denigrate those students who do well, who get the number of points they need. They've worked hard within a system they cannot change. They have achieved everything they can, but the system itself is deeply flawed, and the first problem is the exams themselves.
So long as a student's life is focused on two cathartic events parked in the middle and at the end of secondary schooling then their learning will always be skewed. And, while we don't have a formal system of publishing league tables for schools' exam results, it does happen informally.
We all know the institutions in our areas which are known for producing good academic results, and that produces another negative pressure. It focuses on the teachers' performance in terms only of the results they produce while the whole issue of the quality of their teaching is ignored. By quality I mean the level of understanding they create, not merely the amount of information retained.
How well a student understands a subject will dictate how useful it will be to them in the future, or to put it another way, it is the only viable measure for how educated they are rather than how good their memory is.
If we as a people are truly interested in happy, contented, well-adjusted young people then we should be supportive of the Minister as he faces what for him may well be one of his biggest political tests. If we want to have an education system that produces genuinely educated people and doesn't produce a yearly batch of tragedies then we have to be prepared to reconsider the way we teach from the top down.
We need the entire Government to weigh in with support because, oddly, responsibility for children is actually spread over a number of Departments. We need to start with the pre-school sector which is under ferocious pressure and carry on the changes through every other level. We need to move away from forcing people to start making career choices via their subject choices at the age of 13.
It has been said before so many times that it is easy to dismiss it as a cliche but any country's greatest asset is its people. The proof is all around us in the high-tech industries we've been able to attract using our well-educated workforce as part of the bait. Right now the pool of suitably educated potential employees is nearly empty. To guard our competitive advantage we need to ensure that our system of education is second to none and we must hope that the policy changes under way will help achieve that.