For along time I wondered what the point was in studying for Irish paper II. It’s worth a mere 17% and the work that you must put in order to obtain that 17% is quite heavy! I just didn’t consider it worth my time studying when all I need is a pass in OL as it will be the subject that I’ll be discounting at the end of the Leaving Cert. Nevertheless, despite my views on this section of the exam, I put in about an hour of study last night absorbing all the information I could on “Clare sa Spéir”, “An Cearrbhach Mac Caba” and the poem “An Gealt”.

I opened the paper to see one of my worst fears… Clare sa Speir and An Cearrbhach Mac Caba were merged into the one question which meant that I had to do a question on “An Bhean Og” blindly. Thankfully if you’re ever going to do a question blindly, Irish paper II is where you want it to be with very few marks going for the moderately long answers that are expected of you. I thought that I managed to handle myself relatively well although I was annoyed that I was forgetting some shockingly simple words like “funny” but I handled that by saying “Bhí mé ag gáire nuair a….”.

So of the 17% that’s going for this OL paper, I reckon I’ll be doing well to get 11% which will hopefully supplement the marks I got in my oral, the aural, and paper 1. I have the weekend to myself now and I’ll spending that time studying Maths, Maths and more maths. And History and Biology!