Madam, - I disagree with Joe Rice (June 9th) regarding the current media attention on the State examinations.
I am currently sitting my Leaving Certificate and have found your daily "Exam Times" pages most useful, if only to appease my parents. "See, it says in the paper that the exam was hard - that surely justifies my own lack of knowledge."
I can understand Mr Rice's displeasure at the media "obsession". It is, no doubt, an awful experience to open your morning paper and be confronted with horrible reminders of this period in your own youth. I would ask him to look on the bright side, though. For without the current higher-level English exam I would have little idea what a newspaper was, let alone know how to write a letter to the editor.
Can you imagine a world where the only way young people could express themselves was in monosyllables? I'm sure Mr Rice is shuddering at the thought.
Also, I would like to draw Mr Rice's attention to the other things that grip us Irish: the World Cup, the price of property, the state of hospital A&E units, etc. These are not unimportant topics, but then, neither are the State examinations. They are, for some of us, the single biggest step, challenge or nemesis that we have faced in our relatively short lives. So humour us, and allow us our moment in the spotlight, our pages in the paper.
Finally, I would like to remind Mr Rice that no matter how much he hates the State examinations, those of us sitting them hate them even more. - Yours, etc,
JAKE MEALY, Colestown, Wexford.
Madam, - Joe Rice (June 9th) displays the casual frivolity and ignorance of many Northerners regarding the examinations system south of the Border.
As a Northerner myself I went through the A-levels system many years ago and my daughter is now taking the Leaving Certificate. Mr Rice should know there is no comparison.
The Leaving Cert is perhaps the most difficult, academically challenging and life-changing examination that our students will ever experience. The papers in honours Maths and honours English, for example, are of a standard that would put most first-year (and probably final-year) undergraduates in British and Northern Ireland universities under stress. The Leaving Cert certainly leaves the discredited A-level system (average 95 per cent pass rate) in the halfpenny place.
The Irish Times deserves credit for giving this examination process, which is of such importance to every parent and student in Ireland that the Taoiseach feels it necessary to comment on possible changes, the coverage it deserves.
For Mr Rice to dismiss the coverage of such important events as "trivia" betrays the lack of true understanding in post-Good Friday Agreement Ireland of the people of one state on the island of the everyday concerns of the populace of the other. - Yours, etc,
DIARMAID MAC DERMOTT, Birchfield Park, Goatstown, Dublin 14.