What Mary did next...

Mary’s Musings

In her first column for Senior Times Mary O’Rourke considers Brexit, the joys of reading, the importance of family, the therapeutic value of a good break and the Presidential Election..

‘Connemara has always been a favourite place of mine ..swimming, sailing, trekking and generally driving all over Roundstone, Cleggan, Omey Beach and all the various wonderful spots in or around Clifden’.

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I suppose I should begin by explaining my general background. My name is Mary O’Rourke. I live in Athlone and I am a widow with two grown-up sons, both of whom are married and have children. In fact I am grandmother to six grandchildren, two in Dublin and four in Athlone. Their ages are between seven and sixteen.

Now that’s the background, and I hope to be a regular columnist in Senior Times. Let me say at the beginning I think Senior Times is a wonderful publication and magazine: terrific contributors, very good writing, successfully edited, and wonderful information via advertising et cetera. It really is a good production and I was very pleased when the editor asked if I would consider contributing to it when it comes out every two months. I gladly agreed so here is my first outing, so to speak!

I am writing this in mid-August and it will be September when the magazine reaches the

24 Senior Times l September - October 2018 l www.seniortimes.ie

bookshelves. By now all of the schools, both primary and secondary, are back in full gear. The Leaving Certs results are out and the Junior Certs will be in the next ten days to two weeks, so Ireland is set for the next academic year.

I’m sure many of the readers have children or grandchildren, or if not have friends who have them, so they would know all of the hype and carry on that goes into going back to school. It can be a very traumatic time of course for parents, and costly too, but particularly for young people who may be starting primary school for the first time, or even more importantly who are leaving primary school and going into secondary school.

I always think that is the most important step young children can make. Imagine you leave a small primary school, where the child is familiar with the teachers, the classrooms, the playground

and all of the doings of primary schools. Then at one stroke he or she is transferred to a bewildering new arena: ten or twelve new teachers, hundreds of pupils walking the corridors, a whole range of new subjects, and everything to be absorbed by the young mind of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old. It is a dramatic change and often I feel there is not enough preparation, both in the young person’s mind or indeed in the mind of the teacher who is dealing with these altered young people who have left the cosiness of primary school and entered into the unfathomable, strange and alien environment of a large secondary school.

For many years prior to my going into national politics, which I did in 1982, I taught in a girls’ secondary school here in Athlone for about ten years. I was always glad to have the responsibility of looking after those often nervous, timorous and faltering steps of the twelveyear-olds as they strode falteringly into the