D-grade London boy puts the pop back into higher English

I may have got a D in lower Irish but students have me to thank for the Snow Patrol question in this year’s English paper

I RECALL the lead-up to my own Junior Certificate (or the Inter Cert, as it was known in the palaeontological age) very well. This was a time when to fail Irish meant failing the entire exam, and because I went to school in London until the age of 10, I hadn’t the benefit of learning the language from scratch.

This meant that from primary school onwards, I had to duck and dive my way through Irish classes, study the language as much as I could to get through every possible exam, and hope above all else that my Irish language teachers understood that they were dealing with a London boy with little or no aptitude for the subject matter.

I approached the Inter Cert, then, with a major sense of trepidation, worry and despair. For reasons that still bemuse me, I could read Irish perfectly yet not understand a single sentence of what I read, and so in order to pass the exam I learned off by rote (and by fear) textbook passages and dozens of poems.

When it came to the exam itself, I could read but not understand the questions, but wherever I saw the title of a poem or the name of a textbook, I just wrote what I had learned from memory. Incredibly, this worked – I received a D in the Irish lower level paper. Happy days, indeed, but a residual sense of unfairness clung to me for years; I know for certain that I could have achieved far higher marks in all the other subjects that I had to give less study time to.

Many years later, and to my astonishment, I find that one of my Irish Times reviews (of a Snow Patrol gig late last year) has formed the basis for a question on this year’s Junior Cert higher level English paper.

Frankly, I’m delighted in a professional sense that pop culture is being viewed as a serious academic topic. It might be considered in certain quarters as an inconsequential frippery that you grow out of when you get sense, but culturally, sociologically and creatively it has informed this writer’s world so much more than the enforced if not effectively blackmailed study of a language I can still read yet not understand.

Next year, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my forthcoming book, Westlife ( My Part In Their Downfall), will form the basis of a question on the Leaving Cert higher level English paper.

Until then!

Tony Clayton-Lea writes on popular culture for The Irish Times. His reviews and features appear every Friday in The Ticket.