Colin Sheridan: I cheated the Leaving Cert system, but I was way ahead of my time

I contrived to do the state exams in such a way that I removed the pressure from myself. But then came the betrayal

When I did the Leaving Cert it was the Rubicon you crossed to escape boyhood, and finally become a man. File picture

In June of 1997, I had just turned 17 years old. The world stood on the offside line of internetification, an elbow in, an ankle out, with no VAR to check. 

Mobile phones were only in movies. Car phones were the manifestation of excess. The phone box was where your heart got broken (“it’s not you, it’s your lack of spare change to make longer calls”). 

Your feed was your dinner. An emoji, an exotic, poisonous berry. Love Island, if it existed, may only have done so as an unpublished sonnet by Shelley. Foreign holidays were for protestants. Your parents were your parents, and not your friends.

And the Leaving Cert was the Rubicon you crossed to escape boyhood, and finally become a man. An intellectual and emotional circumcision. Which makes me wonder, why did I ever contemplate repeating it?

More of that anon, as Keats would say, but first to the youth of today, and how lucky they must feel to read the countless messages of good luck and fair fortune from elected politicians. Politicians and personalities, I am certain, teenagers are blissfully unaware exist. 

Unless they are the offspring of said elected representatives, and even then I’d imagine they’d much rather receive a blank card with a fiver in it than an intrusion on their plethora of social media platforms. 

“Jaden, it’s going to be OK! The Junior Minister with Selective Responsibility for Taking Credit while Eschewing all Responsibility for Grotesque Failures has posted a good-luck message to all students doing their state exams with a profound reminder that it is not, in fact, the be-all and end-all, and they qualify it with a memory of their own journey, from Leaving Cert Loser to bone-useless Government Minister.” 

You can picture Jaden raising his head from the toilet bowl, his stomach emptied by nerves and too-much Monster Energy drink. 

“He said that, mum, really??” 

“He did love, now just remember to finish your Paper Two early as we have a flight to Santorini to catch.” 

We never got those messages from politicians. The only messages we got were to tighten our belts, not get anyone pregnant and, under no circumstances, not use any contraception in the act of not getting anybody pregnant. 

They needn’t have worried. While our imaginations were rich, the lived reality of late-1990s rural Mayo was much more John McGahern than Jilly Cooper.

I once had a doctor tell me he never did his Leaving Cert. It was the 60s, he told me, and he was sick for much of his last year in school. His mother wanted him — her eldest son — to follow in his late father’s footsteps and become a GP.

So she wrote an impassioned letter to the university, who, one can only assume, were so moved by her plea they accepted him into first year medicine without so much as a school report. He told me this as he misdiagnosed my shingles as razor burn. On my rib-cage. We are so trusting of doctors, assuming they got good Leaving Certs.

My Leaving Cert story

Back to my own exam experience. In truth, I feel, like the good doctor, I rather cheated the system. 

I am racked with guilt now when I see how triggering it can be for my peers to recall their own exam-trauma, even if it was almost 30 years ago. They speak of it as if it was some deliberate strategy of state-sponsored terrorism. 

What the military would call a “Psyop,” an intelligence tactic, used as a tool of sophisticated propaganda, viral marketing, and mass manipulation. 

Just to be clear, I did do my Leaving Cert, it’s just that I contrived to do it in such a way I removed the pressure from myself by doing it as early — and as young — as possible, enabling a second serve (in tennis parlance) a repechage (in rowing).

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Basically, I bought myself a free shot at the one thing that scared the shite out of every teenager in Ireland. 

I sought to postpone my ordeal by 12 months, while enjoying the pomp and ceremony of the tortured teenager under immense exam stress. I took the flowers without really doing the dance.

It was a gamble, and, even after all these years, it’s impossible to discern whether it paid off. I had a partner in crime. My best friend and neighbour. 

His academic ambitions were admittedly loftier than mine (a fact my mother repeatedly reminded me of, in a fashion only Irish mothers can), but our motives for 'repeating the leavin' were more-or-less aligned. 

Yes, we wanted a dress rehearsal, but we also agreed to hold each other accountable by doing enough work to establish a base-line of acceptable results that would form the basis of our second assault. 

This manifested itself in playing an awful lot of tennis up the town, eating an incalculable amount of Wibbly Wobbly Wonders while sitting on a wall, and speculating endlessly which girls would still be around the following year to be wowed by our grizzled, world-wearied, the things-we’ve-seen personalities that would be being honed by our year in the trenches.

Nemo resideo, we might have told each other, but hey, we are not so old that we were doing honours Latin. In any case, the principle of no man gets left behind was our motto for that first Leaving Cert year. Do well, but not well enough that either of us would leave. 

This was a skill in and of itself. Lean in to the youth shtick. Concentrate more on press-ups and discovering which Brylcreem (red or blue) better suited our amazing hair. 

This would be a year of growth. Of personal development. Of endless day-dreaming and distraction. A gap-year that would conclude with a brown envelope in August that would have our parents reflect with a head-tilt to the side “You did well, son, but we know you can do better.” 

We were — I say with some humility — way ahead of our time.

Betrayal

You know what’s coming. A betrayal. One of us caved. And, yes, it was me who Et-tu-Brute’d my best friend, not by overachieving (I performed according to my bond, no more, no less), but by falling into the most unlikely stream an intensively creative, fantastically distracted 17-year-old boy-man could trip into: a cadetship in the military. 

My friend laughed when I told him, not because he was happy for me, but because he thought it was a joke. He knew I was as conflict-averse as a three-toed sloth, and would rather change colour than pick a fight.

So much so, I had trouble explaining to him that it happened as much by accident as design. Whatever my defence, in accepting it, I took the soup. 

I skipped the real Leaving Cert trauma that second attempt would’ve inflicted, and I left my friend eating Wibbly Wobbly Wonders on the wall by himself amongst all the sonnets, all the Shakespearian comedies and all the girls left vulnerable by my mysterious departure. 

I’m certain he got his own back. I’m certain he told them I was dead, or lost to the priesthood. I don't blame him. I would’ve done the same.

As I reflect now, our plans had holes in it, anyway. Another friend was three months younger than us. He was 16 sitting his exams and he scored 595 points. That, in 1997, in a rural school, is the equivalent of 2,890 points today. 

I don't care what anyone says. He busted the age myth, and no newspapers came to take any pictures of him, let me tell you. He was back in the bog that evening, footing turf, getting eaten by midges.

I make no apology for my nostalgia. Especially because I learned this morning that the movie Barbie is on the Leaving Cert curriculum this year.

That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.