Joseph O’Connor, Novelist

I think people should be encouraged to study, within the limits of rationality, what they want to study. Even at Leaving Cert level, specialism should be encouraged. That way passions will kick in. Students will find something that they’re passionate about, and then the State can assess their knowledge of that.

That’s a completely different thing from the slightly punitive approach, when I did the Leaving, of ‘We have decided that you must learn this and this will be the grading system’. In fairness, it is changing and I think it’ll change more as Ireland becomes more multicultural. There are now people doing Chinese for the Leaving Cert.

If you study music, there’s far more about performance now. If you study history of art, it’s far more about going to an art gallery. The Arts Council now actually have a programme called Writers In Schools where a novelist or a poet will come to the school and talk to your English class. That would have been unheard of when I did the Leaving, when I really did think that literature was written by dead white guys.

I must say as a university teacher, to the extent that you could generalise about my students, the people who have come back to education in their late 20s, or the 30s, or their 40s, or retired, often get so much out of it. I think you’re often better off to do that. I wish I’d done it. John Gormley, who later became a Green Party minister, was in college with me and he had gone off to Germany and came back – and I think he got so much out of it for that reason.

• Joseph O’Connor’s latest novel My Father’s House is published on January 26. He teaches Creative Writing in the University of Limerick.

Read the full Education Special – as well as Pat Carty's in-depth interview with Joseph O'Connor – in the current issue of Hot Press: