“I am a very mature student,” says Liam Ó Ceallaigh, an undergraduate history student at Trinity College Dublin, who will celebrate his 72nd birthday during his upcoming second year at university.
A mature student refers to anyone who is at least 23 years of age on January 1st of the year they start their degree. Third-level colleges reserve a small number of places for mature students who want to do a full-time course. They are assessed in the same way as other students on the course.
Before coming to Trinity, Liam had not been in a classroom since 1970, leaving school at 16 for the printing industry, where he worked for 42 years.
Liam, who is the eldest of 10 children and was born in a tenement building in Dublin’s Cork Street, says there was “no way” he could have attended university. He notes that his parents “didn’t even get to go to second level”.
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Quoting the poet Paula Meehan, he considers himself one of “O’Malley’s children”, the first generation to benefit from the abolishment of secondary school fees, introduced by the Fianna Fáil minister Donogh O’Malley in the late 1960s.
“If he hadn’t done that, I would not have gone to second level,” he says. Because of this, “all my friends became plumbers, carpenters, printers, mechanics. They were all fairly good jobs that paid decent, we were able to buy our own houses, give our children an education”.
In his spare time, Liam enjoyed reading history books, with a particular focus on the period between 1912-1923 in Ireland. “I would have loved to be a teacher, a history teacher,” he says. “But printing was a good industry. There was good money in printing, and it was very good to me over the years.”
Having taken early retirement in 2012, he took up a job as a library guard at Trinity College’s Old Library, which houses the Book of Kells, along with other artefacts such as an original copy of the 1916 Proclamation and a medieval harp known as the Brian Boru harp.
Surrounded by history, Ó Ceallaigh’s passion for the subject reignited, often going above and beyond to share fun facts and quirky stories about the college’s past with tourists passing through the historic building.
As retirement approached, he says he took the approach of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who despite being in his 80s, is still actively touring and performing sold-out shows. After hearing about the Trinity Access Programmes (TAP), which aim to support people from underrepresented areas to access third-level education, Liam submitted an application for the foundation course, a one-year preparation programme to prepare students for the transition to third-level education.
Within the foundation course, students can choose a broad area of study, such as arts, health and science or social science, and also complete writing skills courses, maths classes and educational guidance programmes. It was set up in 1999 to offer another way into Trinity for young people whose social, economic and cultural experiences have prevented them from going to college.
Liam says that about three months into the foundation course, he started having doubts. “I was doing things like philosophy, Greek mythology,” he says. “Do I need to do all this to myself at 70 years of age?”
The encouragement he received from his lecturers and the staff at TAP gave him the motivation to keep going. After passing a set of exams to move on to an undergraduate course, he started his four-year degree in history last September.
Despite not being the stereotypical college fresher, the transition to third-level was actually much easier for Liam than it is for many post-leaving-certers. He notes that working in the college gave him a good knowledge of where buildings were, while other first-years got lost searching for lecture halls.
During his first year, or Junior Freshman year as Trinity calls it, he explored early Christian Ireland, modern Europe, and a class on environmental history, which he admits he was “a little apprehensive about”, but ended up really enjoying.
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He has made “lots of new friends, young and old”, noting there are a couple of other mature students in his lectures, but he also mingles with the younger students too. He has a Whatsapp group chat with his classmates where they offer each other much-needed support around busy exam periods and stressful essay deadlines.
When asked how he finds the workload of a full-time undergraduate degree, Liam feels that he “overcooks it”, spending hours reading over a completed essay before clicking the submit button.
“It’s just that, being so long out of school, not being in that environment for such a long time, I don’t want to make mistakes.”
He is very happy with his results from the year, and is looking forward to taking classes on Irish sagas, Northern Ireland and European history in September. One class that has piqued his interest explores the history of coffee.
“When I grew up in Cabra, I don’t think we even drank coffee. We didn’t in our house, coffee was unknown. There were certainly no coffee houses anywhere.”
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Even in his spare time, Liam shares his passion for history with others, giving historical walking tours of Trinity’s campus with the Trinity Trails tour group on lecture-free days.
“I wouldn’t have thought even 12, 13 years ago that I’d be in Trinity as a student, studying history and giving tours.”
He thinks that anyone with an interest in trying to expand their knowledge should consider returning to education as a mature student, and has suggested it to some of his friends.
Kathleen O’Toole Brennan, associate director at TAP, says that going to university is “often described as a straight line trajectory” from second-level to third-level, but there needs to be a consideration for the “lifelong approach to learning”, which can “branch out like a tree”.
She says mature students “change the dynamic in the classroom”, benefiting other students by bringing their lived experience to conversations.
“We quite literally have mature students that have come on our programme who are exceptional”, she added, citing Senator Lynn Ruane as an example, along with a student who was recently sworn in as a judge.
