Looking back on a Leaving lottery

MY LEAVING CERT/David McWilliams: We managed to deliver respectable answers to all sorts of questions.

'If he sticks up his swotty hand again for another book of paper, I'll murder him. It's only half-10, he's already written 20 pages and I'm stuck on page 10, trying to compare the lifecycle of a liverfluke to the phytophthora infestans. And what use will all this be to me?"

Looking back, the most extraordinary thing about the Leaving Cert is how we were able to fit all the stuff into our heads. In a three-week period, we managed to deliver respectable answers to all sorts of questions.

While most of the exams were a horrific experience, there were funny moments - the most hilarious of which has to be the oral Irish malarkey. Needless to say, the Dún Laoghaire Gaeltacht was somewhat in decline when my class made it to the oral exam and Blackrock College, DeValera's alma mater, was hardly a fulcrum of Gaelic culture (despite Dev's wishes).

In this regard, I was a bit of a cheat, having gone to an ordinary national school initially and having a fluent Irish-speaking, schoolteacher mother. In contrast, most of my classmates were products of the private system where football meant rugby and hurling was a foreign game. Asking blokes from Monkstown to speak, even for two minutes, a language they could not understand was only going to have farcical results.

A terrifying moment for all students comes when "your" questions do not appear. Totally unintentionally, the Leaving Cert taught me to speed-read - one of the few things I have not forgotten. Scanning down the paper for your key words was an essential part of the first 10 minutes. My memories of the Leaving Cert can be summed up as a mixture of hope, fear and hormones - all packed into one sweaty month.

I should have been much more carefree; after all, not everyone knew what happened to papers once they were collected at the end of the exam. Ever since my Uncle Tony, a legendary Latin and maths teacher, lost two dozen honours-maths papers to a gust of wind on Ballybunion strand, I knew the Leaving Cert results were a bit of a lottery.

As the ink blended into the Atlantic that morning, nobody was to know that the maths results of a few random schools were made up. Those precious results - apparently an entirely reliable indicator of a 17-year-old's worth - were concocted based on a few dodgy averages worked out on the back of an envelope by a panic-stricken teacher doing a nixer in a Kerry seaside town. The fact that there was never any demand for re-marking speaks for itself.

Although armed with this knowledge, still all the worries of the world descended on Wednesday, June 8th, 1983. By the time I sat down, wedged alphabetically between a Mahon and a McManus, blind panic had overtaken self-conscious teenage bravado. Minutes earlier, I was manfully sharing three stale Rothmans with four mates, laughing and throwing shapes. But when the pink paper hit the desk, the desperate scour for "your" questions took over. And then it was all over, washed down with oceans of Stag and Pernod 'n' black. Never again.

David McWilliams presents the Breakfast Show on Newstalk 106 FM and the Agenda programme on TV3.