Leaving Cert student diary: ‘I've deleted TikTok and Instagram. Phones are a big annoyance for me'
The Leaving Cert dominates our lives like nothing else ever has – and hopefully never will again. It's such an intense set of exams. The Junior Cert was stressful for me too but, looking back, I don't really know why. The Leaving Cert is just on another level, and it's a shared pressure that everyone feels.
The past three months have felt very long and drawn out, but I'm now in the thick of it and the end is in sight.
The exams have been a mixed bag for me, so far. I was nervous going into English paper one, but very glad that I could tackle a short story. Paper two was tough, as the question on the poet Derek Mahon focused on the nuances of spoken vs written poetry, and it was unapproachable.
Maths paper one was difficult but I preferred it to maths paper two. As for paper one in Irish, I was happy enough, and glad there were no particularly strange accents in the listening comprehension.
READ MORE
I'd love to study medicine, but I don't know if I will get enough in the HPAT (medical school admissions test).
I've already decided that, if I don't get medicine, I'm not looking to repeat the year or apply to European universities. This is because I'd be happy with my second choice, engineering.
I love art too, and I am doing it as a Leaving Cert subject, but it's not one of my college choices.
But all study and no rest is counterproductive, so I try to squeeze in a walk every day. I usually go with my dad. We live in Glassan, Co Westmeath, where there's plenty of lakes, forests and nature, so it's a great way to clear the head. On our walks, I am future focused: what I want to do after school, how I will spend the summer, the big hikes I will have and the day trips I have planned. I'm also off to Lisbon for a city break with my sister
During the summer, I want to take up taekwondo again. I have a black belt, but had to step back from it in recent months to focus on the exams.
Another thing that I stepped back from is social media. I had TikTok, but deleted the app, and then I looked at it on the website rather than the app, so I deleted my entire account. Same with Instagram, where that quick, fast video feed draws you in.
In general, I'm trying to be more conscious of my phone use, and put time limits on it, because phones are a big annoyance for me. I see people who are younger than me just glued to their phones. When I'm on the phone for too long, I feel anxious, so how can people who are 11 or 12 manage with such an addictive device?
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Irish Times
3 hours ago
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Alison Healy on how a 19-year old woman tricked the world with a literary hoax
The news desk of the New York Times had a bountiful harvest of stories to choose from on June 4th, 1926. Its front page features a story about the Crown Prince Gustav and Crown Princess Louise of Sweden stopping by the laboratory of Thomas Edison in New Jersey. He told the prince he had come up with a record that could play for 40 minutes and to prove it, he played I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen to the impressed royals. He also whipped a strip of film from his pocket and handed it to the prince, telling him it was a motion picture. Also on the front page is a story about a theatrical producer sentenced to prison over a case involving a bathtub on a stage that contained alcohol – this was the era of Prohibition of course. And in something that could have come straight out of an Agatha Christie novel, there's a report about a suspected gem thief who was arrested outside the Ritz and found to have had $30,000 worth of jewels in a secret compartment of her handbag. But most interesting of all for Irish readers is the headline 'Girl Tricks World with Literary Hoax intended as Joke'. A sub-heading explains that 'Magdalen King-Hall of Erin's Wild North Coast Wrote of Paris and Venice of Long Ago'. READ MORE The newspaper scoop explains how 'a little Irish girl, the 19-year-old daughter of a British naval officer, has accomplished the greatest literary hoax of the century'. Magdalen King-Hall, who was living in Portaferry, Co Down at the time, was the secret hand behind a best-selling sensation. The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 was published in 1925 and was purported to be the discovered diary of Cleone Knox from Castle Kearney, Co Down. It reads like the mid-18th century version of Bridget Jones' Diary, with a mild hint of Sex in the City and a sprinkle of Jane Austen thrown in for good measure. Conveniently, the foreword explains there is no portrait or miniature of Cleone Knox because of a fire at Castle Kearney in 1808. The diary opens with her beau, the handsome rogue David Ancaster, falling from the ivy as he attempts to gain entry to her bedroom late one night. Papa finds him prostrate on the ground and there is hell to pay. She's not too bothered though as she adds that she 'Tried on my new striped silk gown which becomes me excessively well.' To avoid any more amorous indiscretions, Papa takes Cleone and her brother Ned away on a grand European tour. She finds herself in a series of humorous predicaments, administering a sound box on the ears to a drunken suitor, and falling off the chair with tiredness when a hostess insists on reading from Milton's Paradise Lost for three hours. Like an olde world Forrest Gump, she meets everyone who matters. In France, she's presented to the king and queen at Versailles. She finds the queen to be dowdy and the royal daughters plain and clumsy while King Louis XV is handsome but dissolute. In Switzerland, Voltaire receives her family in a chintz dressing-gown and reminds her of a 'chattering old magpie'. Her brother runs off with a nun in Venice which makes her wonder if there are not enough loose women in Venice 'without him ravishing a cloistered nun'. The diary ends abruptly with the surprise appearance of David Ancaster in Venice. We are informed that they eloped, married and lived happily ever after in Co Down with their brood of 12 children. Recalling the hoax diary on the King-Hall family website, Magdalen King-Hall's late son Richard Perceval Maxwell wrote that The Sunday Times had published a long and enthusiastic review of the book and lauded it as a great find, similar to the Pepys diaries. 'One reader, Winston Churchill…excused his late arrival at a dinner party by saying he had had to finish the Diary before coming,' he wrote. Six months after the bestseller was published, Magdalen King-Hall admitted her deception, thus further boosting sales. She was bored and had written it to pass the time. She also pointed to an error that could have blown her cover – her diarist was reading Walpole's Castle of Otrantoe a few months before the book was published. Happily for readers, Magdalen King-Hall put her lively imagination to great effect in later life, becoming a journalist and successful author. The mid-1920s were no barrel of laughs, with Hitler publishing Mein Kampf and Mussolini becoming a dictator, but, for a short and glorious time, Magdalen King-Hall added greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
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Leaving Cert student diary: ‘I've deleted TikTok and Instagram. Phones are a big annoyance for me'
The Leaving Cert dominates our lives like nothing else ever has – and hopefully never will again. It's such an intense set of exams. The Junior Cert was stressful for me too but, looking back, I don't really know why. The Leaving Cert is just on another level, and it's a shared pressure that everyone feels. The past three months have felt very long and drawn out, but I'm now in the thick of it and the end is in sight. The exams have been a mixed bag for me, so far. I was nervous going into English paper one, but very glad that I could tackle a short story. Paper two was tough, as the question on the poet Derek Mahon focused on the nuances of spoken vs written poetry, and it was unapproachable. Maths paper one was difficult but I preferred it to maths paper two. As for paper one in Irish, I was happy enough, and glad there were no particularly strange accents in the listening comprehension. READ MORE I'd love to study medicine, but I don't know if I will get enough in the HPAT (medical school admissions test). I've already decided that, if I don't get medicine, I'm not looking to repeat the year or apply to European universities. This is because I'd be happy with my second choice, engineering. I love art too, and I am doing it as a Leaving Cert subject, but it's not one of my college choices. But all study and no rest is counterproductive, so I try to squeeze in a walk every day. I usually go with my dad. We live in Glassan, Co Westmeath, where there's plenty of lakes, forests and nature, so it's a great way to clear the head. On our walks, I am future focused: what I want to do after school, how I will spend the summer, the big hikes I will have and the day trips I have planned. I'm also off to Lisbon for a city break with my sister During the summer, I want to take up taekwondo again. I have a black belt, but had to step back from it in recent months to focus on the exams. Another thing that I stepped back from is social media. I had TikTok, but deleted the app, and then I looked at it on the website rather than the app, so I deleted my entire account. Same with Instagram, where that quick, fast video feed draws you in. In general, I'm trying to be more conscious of my phone use, and put time limits on it, because phones are a big annoyance for me. I see people who are younger than me just glued to their phones. When I'm on the phone for too long, I feel anxious, so how can people who are 11 or 12 manage with such an addictive device?
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
If we want free-flowing hurling we must accept the refereeing that facilitates it
On the raised television gantry at the Gaelic Grounds on Saturday night, Alan Connolly leant on the barrier, while on the pitch behind him Cork fans belted out a chorus of 'After All'. When he turned around to take in the scene below, the decibel levels rose. Liam Sheedy, Donal Óg Cusack and Henry Shefflin were all standing beside him. Hurling royalty. But for those draped in red and white below it was clear that Connolly was the star attraction. Such was the level of the noise, Shefflin had to lean over at one stage to repeat his question to the Cork forward. During the entire interview Connolly – still in full gear and boots – carried the chilled-out disposition of a man who had just perched himself at a poolside bar in their flip-flops. There were the usual questions about the game and then host Joanne Cantwell interjected: 'Can I ask, when there was a change in referee – because Thomas Walsh referees a very particular way, and James Owens referees a very different way – what was it like?' READ MORE Connolly smiled apologetically, seemingly recalling the sight of Walsh requiring treatment on the pitch for cramp. 'It was funny, I hope he's all right,' he said before wondering if it had ever happened before where a referee had to leave the field. Informed that it had indeed, he continued: 'It was interesting, they reffed the game the same enough I thought, to be honest. There wasn't too much of a change, I don't know.' Plenty of others seemed to know. A quick scroll through social media on Saturday night would have demonstrated one of the main talking points from a gripping Munster final was the performance of the referee. Walsh was lauded by many for letting the game flow, his approach credited with contributing to the match, but for others the officiating facilitated a level of lawlessness that went too far. It quickly became a Marmite debate. A couple of days on and still many conversations about the game eventually arrive at the referee. Cork's Alan Connolly has his helmet tugged by Limerick's Diarmaid Byrnes. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Strip it all back and it leaves one very straightforward yet complex question about hurling: What game do we actually want? For those of us currently in a space where we spend many Saturday mornings ferrying kids to Go Games, hurling can seem a very different sport at either end of the chain. But children learn the game not only because of their coaches, they also learn from the referees they encounter. The referees at Go Games are predominately teenagers who have been persuaded to take up the whistle. Many of them spend a lot of their time during matches patiently instructing seven- and eight-year-olds on what to do next. They'll give the goalkeeper a second chance at puck-outs, or on spotting repeated fresh air shots the referee might encourage the young player to hit the ball along the ground instead. When it comes to juvenile sport, both the coaches and referees are heroes. But retaining referees is an ongoing problem for the GAA. Earlier this year Dublin GAA arranged a training course to try attract new referees to deal with a 'chronic shortage' of officials. Gaelic football and hurling are different sports but they share a common indistinctness in terms of some playing rules. Hurling, in particular, can exist in different forms depending on whether the referee wants to swallow their whistle or blow it. So, what game do we want? At the start of each half last Saturday, Walsh held the sliotar in his hand while a pair of opposing midfielders locked horns in that perpetual dance of bouncing off each other and snarling like a pair of bucking bulls released from their pen for the first time in months. Limerick's Shane O'Brien celebrates winning a free. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho As their shoulder-fest found its rhythm, the intensity spread across the pitch and several little replica dances sparked off. The roars from the stands increased, the Gaelic Grounds becoming a sporting tinderbox. The atmosphere, electric. In those few seconds at the start of each half, the terms of engagement were being set. If the referee was allowing those battles to fester, the players had a fair idea that a decent level of aggression would go unpunished. And so it played out. There were fouls not blown, flaking ignored, players got away with stuff. Both management teams then surrounded the referee at half-time – presumably to check if perhaps he could arrange it that only their lads would be allowed do the flaking. One of the positive outcomes of the FRC's new rules in football has been a greater level of respect towards match officials. Gaelic football referees at club and county level have seen a significant decrease in verbal abuse. And yet another of the FRC's rules has been to have a one v one throw-in at the start of each half. Instead, you now have two players standing on opposite sidelines and then dashing in when the ball is tossed in the air. For all the progressive FRC changes, the start of Gaelic football matches has lost something. It's lost that edge of physicality and aggression. But perhaps that is the game we are trying to manufacture now in football? Are we saying we don't want those displays of hostility at the outset of matches? Are we saying we want a game where players hand the ball back to their opponent? That, of course, is football's journey of discovery right now. But those are the kind of questions hurling might eventually have to answer too. As a sporting contest, what the Cork and Limerick players served up on Saturday was captivating. It was a game full of endeavour and desire, two tribes going full-blooded to represent their people. You couldn't take your eyes off it. They deserve great credit for producing such entertainment and drama, but at the same time those matches are also almost impossible to referee. If we can at least agree on that, perhaps we're not far away from having the game we want.
