Of all the public systems at work in contemporary Ireland, there is only one whose integrity could be taken for granted. The political system, and in particular its dominant party, was riddled with corruption. The planning process could be bent by greasing the right palms. The integrity of the taxation system was fatally undermined by amnesties.
The banking system sold its soul to bogus non-residents. The criminal justice system could be distorted in favour of People Like Us. The captains of industry were sailing offshore. Even the church, at the very highest levels, looked elsewhere when evidence of shocking abuses of power was staring it in the face.
If you were the right kind of person, with the right connections and the right figures in your bank account, there was nothing you couldn't fix. Like God, the system moved in mysterious ways and wonders were performed.
But one thing couldn't be fixed. One very important piece of the machinery of State remained tamper-proof. There was, in the State examination system, a single public space where some kind of rough justice prevailed.
Daddy couldn't have a word with someone over a drink in the golf club, pointing out that his little girl had her heart set on sociology at Trinity. The rugby coach couldn't whisper in the right ear that you'd done the school proud on the pitch and, after all, where would you get the time to study for the Leaving what with all the training and travelling? Your obvious merits as a member of the right set cut no ice. The web of old school ties couldn't break your fall.
All sorts of inequalities came into play, of course. Nevertheless, when the papers were distributed and the clock started to tick its way down, the exam hall contained the nearest thing that this society ever gets to social justice.
The bright, lucky, determined young woman with semi-literate parents from a bleak, ugly, windswept housing estate was looking at the same blank sheet of paper as the pampered son of the banker, the solicitor, the businessman. And she could feel that, from that moment until the CAO results came out, she would, for perhaps the only time in her life, be judged on what she did, not who she was.
The system may have been brutal. It may have had its gremlins and glitches. But the proof of its integrity lay in the rage it evoked among the well-to-do parents of students who could not perform well in the Leaving Cert.
The yelps of outrage at the callousness of a system that simply failed to register the obvious superiority of their golden offspring were the most eloquent testimony that here, for once, was something that could not be fixed.
And now this last preserve of integrity is itself under attack. Not from the privileged whingers who have always hated it. Not from the glad-handers and tip-the-winkers and political masseurs who fix everything else. But from the very people who can, and usually do, take most pride in its achievements - the teachers.
Blinded as it seems to be by anger and resentment, the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland has its heart set on sabotaging this year's State exams and, in the process, betraying a trust that its members have built up over the best part of a century.
Last Saturday, as the ASTI's central executive committee debated the proposed peace formula for their pay dispute with the Government, the name of Jim Larkin was evoked by an impassioned delegate. Larkin, said Monica Keane, would turn in his grave if he thought the ASTI would accept the compromise offer that was on the table.
While predicting the emotions of the dead is hardly an exact science, I would suggest that what would be far more likely to have the father of the Irish trade union movement churning up the soil in Glasnevin cemetery would be the thought that trade unionists would sacrifice one of the few mechanisms for social equality in the Republic to the temporary demands of an industrial dispute.
Like all workers, ASTI members have a right to withdraw their labour. Whether or not one agrees with their demand for a 30 per cent pay increase for the year 2000 alone, they have a right to strike in pursuit of that demand. But supervising and marking exams is not part of their normal job.
Marking exams is a voluntary activity for which the pay is completely separate from the normal teaching salary. If the ASTI's demand was for higher payments for marking exams, withdrawing co-operation might make sense. But the pay claim has nothing to do with this work. The exams are being targeted purely and simply because that is where most hurt will be inflicted.
In this case, though, the collateral damage will be even worse than the direct hit. Some kind of patched-up Leaving Cert will go ahead, but it will be in all likelihood a hollow mockery of the real exam. And a mockery too of all that countless teachers have worked their guts out to achieve over many decades. The integrity of a system that has earned public trust will be breached.
Once that breach is made, it will not easily be repaired. The status of the teaching profession, bound up as it is with the integrity of the exam system, will be irreparably damaged. The grubby, sleazy nod-and-wink Ireland that most teachers abhor will have scored its greatest victory as the last barrier to its final triumph self-destructs.
fotoole@irish-times.ie