Leaving Cert history: Yeats features on fair paper

Nuremberg, 1916, and US presidents were among the topics to appear on this year’s higher level history paper, which gave students a reasonable amount of choice in each section and was generally seen by teachers as fair.

Fintan O’Mahony, a history teacher at Scoil Mhuire in Carrick-on-Suir, said that the documents question, which showed a piece of writing by an Irish diplomat reflecting on 1930s Germany, was interesting and accessible.

Mr O’Mahony said that a question asking students to argue whether Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson was a better US president had strengths and weaknesses. He welcomed that students were asked to form an opinion and to make an argument, but pointed out that Truman doesn’t feature very heavily on the course.

The history paper, in many parts, challenges students to think critically and form their own opinions. To this end, students were asked about whether Wilhelm II’s foreign policy was “more provocative” than Bismarck’s, a broad question on the social and economic problems of Ireland from 1923-1945, and why the outcome of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty proved to be so contentious.

A highly anticipated question on 1916 – which has also appeared as a topic on this year’s French, English and Irish papers – asked students to outline the main events of the Rising. “It was a peach of a question,” said Mr O’Mahony. A second part asked students whether the events of 1916 had, as WB Yeats said, changed Ireland utterly; this was “another peach” because it was open-ended.

Mary Higgins, TUI representative and a teacher at Clonaslee College in Co Laois, said that the ordinary level paper was very doable.