Maith thú! Kildare woman (83) aces Leaving Cert

An 83-year-old woman who sat the Leaving Certificate Irish exam in Newbridge earlier this summer received the highest possible grade!

Bernadette Hayden, who runs Kildare International School of Excellence for Young Musicians at Herbert Lodge, opened her results live on RTÉ’s Liveline programme and revealed that she earned an O1 grade. “I’m amazed!” she said.

Bernadette explained that she loves the language. “My mother taught me my Irish and we had great teachers in the Mercy nuns in Ennis,” she recalled. “It’s a wonderful language.” 

Regarding her advice for any students who may be disappointed with their results, Bernadette said “nobody should be disappointed. Anybody who sits the Leaving Cert has been brave enough to come through all the discipline of learning their subjects. What they got probably doesn’t reflect at all – if they’re disappointed – what’s possible for them. Because exams can be quite challenging."

Bernadette, who is originally from Co Limerick, first sat her Leaving Cert back in 1958. Her father did his in 1922 in Newbridge College, her children attended that school and her grandchildren are there now. Last year Bernadette did Music and she returned in 2024 for Irish, as she noticed some of her students were coming from Gaelscoileanna.

“I registered there with them and they were very helpful and I went in and sat the Irish paper,” she told The Ray D’Arcy Show on RTÉ Radio. “It was challenging enough, there were lots of new poems in it but still I had the basic vocabulary because I was a primary teacher all my life and I had plenty of Irish, my parents were both teachers and they had plenty of Irish.” 

Bernadette told RTÉ News that her fellow students were “magnificent. They couldn’t be more helpful to me. ‘Are you sure now you have everything?’ ‘Do you know the rules for this and that?’ They were brilliant.”