Students around the country breathed a collective sigh of relief on opening English paper two in the Leaving Cert this afternoon which teachers said was largely "as predicted".
Paper 2 is always the subject of speculation, particularly about which poets are expected to come up on the day and this year the smart money was on Eavan Boland, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, who all turned up as expected.
A slight surprise was WB Yeats as Wordsworth would have been a more predictable choice but with three others to choose from students would not have been stuck.
Young poet Leanne O'Sullivan's Poetry was the choice in the unseen section.
Section one, in which students are asked about a single text – Wuthering Heights, Ibsen's A Doll's House, A Whistle in the Dark by Tom Murphy, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath or Hamlet - held no surprises.
Students of Hamlet were given a choice between answering questions on themes of revenge and justice or on the villainy and redeeming features of the character of Claudius in the play.
Those who studied Wuthering Heights would have been pleased to see a question on its heroine Catherine Earnshaw and another on the contrasting worlds of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
For the comparative question, students were given a choice between answering questions on the theme or on the cultural context of at least two texts they had previously studied.