We’ve been robbed of an Irish Orals victory that was ours for the taking
And like that, I’ll never have to do another sraith pictiúr again. You would think I might be clicking my heels. Over the last decade, my love of the Irish language has been sorely tested by these blighted picture stories, brought home by three successive state exam candidates for my consideration, assistance and, inevitably, for some of the most incendiary arguments we’ve ever had in this house. The Boy was the worst, unreasonable and unmovable across a couple of excruciating years in which we shouted at each other (me in Irish, he in English) about whether that shopping centre employee delivering the lost child back to her parents was actually the manager. By the end, the only way we could survive the tortuous trial by sraith pictiúrí was to make up alternative, bold stories that made us laugh until the tears fell with merciful release.
There was only a summer respite between The Boy’s last Leaving Cert sraith pictiúr and The Youngest’s first. And with it, a new unreasonable demand: six sentences for each picture. On that terrible first day, one of the pictures was of a teenager looking at a clock. Nothing else. You could be fluent in a thousand languages and still struggle to get six sentences out of that. And so it continued for eighteen months, agony heaped on agony. And even though her Irish is a million times better than her older siblings – finally, one of them is actually teaching me phrases I didn’t know – the ordeal was never less than excruciating.
And now, like ships in the Bermuda triangle, there they are, gone. And we are bereft. It’s not fair, of course, but then nothing about this crisis is fair. If either of my older children’s Leaving Cert orals had been cancelled, it would have been an occasion to punch the air: it is a matter of record that while his girlfriend spent 15 minutes discussing Trump’s dystopian vision in her Irish oral, a mile away, my Boy was being asked who his favourite Dublin footballer was, the examiner having quickly got the measure of the man. But The Youngest, ah God. She might have got close to that 40% all on her own.
And it wasn’t just the pictiúrí: for a year, we’ve been having longer and better conversations as Gaeilge. We have recently dealt with how she would handle the death of The Dog without crying if it came up. Just a fortnight ago, we worked out a whole spiel on the virus and how worried people should be. And now, she is going to get the same result as the student who stole the toilet from the girls’ bathroom.
When The Youngest was born, my sister — who was then the Queen of State Exams, or some such noble calling — confidently predicted that her newest niece would never sit a Leaving Cert. Her foresight was based on the phasing out of the unloved exam, but now it appears she was just some sort of weird Mystic Meg sitting at my kitchen table.
It would have been great if it had been The Young Adult, who suffered some sort of a breakdown over her Leaving Cert, whose exams were curtailed. And a cancellation wouldn’t have knocked a step off her brother’s carefree stride. But I was playing the joker on The Youngest. This time, I was going to be the mother in SuperValu who speaks too loud in high numbers to strangers on results day. Now, the mother of the student who robbed the toilet will be shouting as loud. And she’ll have an extra toilet.
Away from all the drama of the cancelled orals and practicals – and oh, you should have heard her piano pieces — Google classroom has kicked in and, as far as I can discern, is working well enough. Because my daughter’s school is not posh (ie a state school), they don’t have video links and so can’t see the stripes of their teachers’ pyjamas, but at 18 they should be well able for a little hands-off tuition.
In the meantime, an unexpected outcome of all this remoteness is that The Youngest has suddenly started referring to her teachers by their first names. Texting and chatting online with teenagers, the general elusive other worldliness of teachers has been quickly reduced to the status of everyone else “in the group.” Whether teachers and younger students will ever regain boundaries and formality when normal service resumes will be fascinating to observe. As to my own girl, weeks away from the finishing line, these trivialities won’t apply. Right now, I can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse.