The Class of ’67… that Summer of ‘67

Fifty years ago this Summer, the boys – the young men – of the Leaving Cert class of Mount Sion CBS, in Waterford, were not too pushed about happenings in the wider world – like Flower Power, Sergeant Pepper or the war in Vietnam. Our main focus was on getting through the examination.

A few days before the ‘off’ we gathered at the traditional spot for class and team photographs in front of the big hall door of the monastery. A couple of hardy rebels never showed. A legendary local photographer, Annie Brophy, had recorded our Baptisms, Communions and Confirmations and now ducked behind the black cape of her big tripod camera to snap this further milestone in our lives.

The Leaving Cert class, Mount Sion CBS, June 1967

I was part of the few, that happy few, that band of brothers. I think the first examination was a paper in Maths; in Irish we called it Matamaitic. During the lunch break, one of the country boys who travelled a distance into the school every day came up to me excitedly to say that he had read an article by me in that day’s ‘Irish Times’.

At the time, our house bought the ‘Irish Independent’ so I had to wait until the second exam paper was over before rushing out to the nearby newsagents and sweet shop to buy the ‘Times’. Sure enough, ‘Doing an Examination’, with my by-line, was on the Features page, beside an article by the renowned journalist, Mary Maher. I had written it as an essay a few months previously and our inspiring English teacher, Seán Crowe, got me to read it out for the class. It was very critical of the meat grinder process that was – and still is – the Leaving Cert. Some of the lads liked it, so on an off chance, I sent it off – still in long hand – to the ‘Irish Times’ and forgot all about it. A few days later, someone wrote a Letter to the Editor in response and a girl in county Cork wrote to me saying how much she empathised with it.

Three days before, the Six Day War had broken out between Israel and much of the Arab world. With another lad in the class, whose sister had a typewriter, I produced a letter from ‘the Israeli embassy in London’ appealing for Irish volunteers to fight with the Israelis. The letter was signed by a Major Shlomo Argov, Military Attaché at the embassy. Volunteers were requested to present themselves at Baldonnel aerodrome at a certain time and date, from where they would be flown to the Middle East by US Globemaster transport planes.

This jape conflated some strands of recent history – the American airlift of Irish troops from Baldonnel to the Congo and Frank Ryan’s raising of an Irish column to fight with the International Brigades in Spain. Before the ruse was rumbled, a few brave class mates had volunteered. Maybe they preferred the terrors of war to the terrors of doing the Leaving Cert? In any event, as it happened, the plucky Israelis didn’t need help from anyone and they destroyed the Arab forces in six days and annexed much of their territory.

1967 was an inflection point in the evolution of Mount Sion. Like an ancient glacier, the all-Irish, Gaelic nationalist ethos had developed a fissure. Our Maths teacher, Brother Smith, surreptitiously taught us the course in English, hurriedly cleaning the blackboard and dropping his voice whenever the Superior, An Bráthair SP Ó Dugáin, hove into view. The following year, Ó Dúgáin was gone and was replaced by a new Superior, Brother Brereton, who allowed the trickle of English tuition to broaden into a river. In a bastion of Gaelic games, where the very foundations of Waterford’s meagre tally of All Ireland hurling titles had been laid, the boys went on strike for official recognition of a school soccer team and they succeeded.

My Irish was good. This was a huge advantage in a hard school where we suffered corporal punishment, often severe, from the day we started in Junior Infants. I was sometimes the interlocutor, or go-between, sandwiched between the class and the teachers, the school authorities and even the Superior. If there was an escapade to be explained away, or a half day or free class to be cajoled, I was the spokesman. I sometimes felt like one of those guys we used to see in the old prisoner-of-war films, whose job was to plead on behalf of the POWs with the Nazi or Japanese camp commandant for better treatment.

My Leaving results were far from stellar but I managed to win a silver medal from the Department of Education for writing the best essay in Irish. No one ever said anything, but I couldn’t shrug off the feeling that the teachers and brothers were disappointed with the class results overall. We did not produce the traditional bumper crop of university scholarships, with full marks in the papers on Maths, Applied Maths and Physics (plus a 10% bonus for doing them in Irish!) and a few successes in the Civil Service exams.

Some of the lads went back for another year to repeat and get better results. A new scheme of university grants had made it economically more feasible for working class lads like us to make it to university. I couldn’t face another year of it. I’d had enough of the tension and hypocrisy. I started to work and study locally to become a Chartered Accountant but dropped out after a year. Like the guy in Robert Frost’s poem:

‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.’