Brendan Griffin (Kerry South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome everyone here today and thank them for their contributions which were very interesting. I may be the youngest person in the room. This day 14 years ago I would have been starting into my special topic with everything flying everywhere - that was a major operation. At the time we were a relatively small class doing leaving certificate history, but not because of the teacher. On the contrary, we had a model teacher who brought history to life in the classroom and instilled in all of us a great enthusiasm for it, a fantastic teacher. The feeling at the beginning of fourth year, as it was in our school, was that it was too difficult to get points in history for the amount of time we would have to put into it. I welcome the fact that the exam has become less onerous since I did it in 1999. The exam was a race against time. One had a special topic and four essays to complete in a ridiculously short space of time. It is a vicious circle because when I was in second year at NUI Galway many students who had an interest in history and were thinking of becoming teachers did not take history for second and third year because they felt that the teaching positions were not there as too few students were taking it at leaving certificate level. The saddest point is that I recall sitting in Professor Gearoid O'Tuathaigh's classes and seeing people who were not taking history in second and third year coming in to sit at the back of the lecture hall. They very much enjoyed the lectures but were not part of the class. Usually it is the other way around, people do not show up at all.