Stephen Byrne has reflected on his 'crazy' decision to re-sit his Leaving Certificate exams this year for the RTÉ documentary Leaving Again, saying he couldn't have gotten through the year without his new classmates.
Watch Stephen recall his first day back at school and his results day nerves:
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Having sat his Leaving Cert in 2009, Stephen did what few – if any – can say they did: he decided to shred his results instead of opening them.
For his documentary Leaving Again, which airs on RTÉ One tonight at 10.15pm, he decided to re-do 6th year and re-sit his exams, all while maintaining his full-time job as a broadcaster.
His decision to do his exams again as an adult stemmed from how they caused him "a lot of trauma" when he was a teenager, and Stephen is someone who tends to face his fears head on.
"I've been using the analogy of, I face my fears when I am afraid of something so I used to be afraid of heights, I couldn't even step on the second floor of Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre I was that scared of them, so I went skydiving," Stephen told RTÉ Entertainment
"I hated snakes because I grew up in Australia, so I bought a pet snake. So the Leaving Cert caused me a lot of trauma when I was younger so I thought I'll apply the same logic and go back and do it again – I'm cured."
Can't wait for people to see this. The first teaser for Leaving Again.
— Stephen Byrne (@stephenbyrne) September 16, 2018
Also. So Nervous. This has been a really tough year for a multitude of reasons.
Never been this raw on television before, its usually my job to maintain face and stay calm. Thats out the window. pic.twitter.com/qc6OgTwe2I
When pressure began to mount as Stephen juggled his career and studies, he credited his classmates for being a big support to him.
"There were months where work got really tough or life got really tough, and I was just burnt out by the sheer amount of work and travel and exhaustion of trying to fit in 12 hour days around everything else, and working weekends and everything... But thinking back, it was probably the students around me that got me through," he said.
Speaking about his "huge respect for the youth of this country" he praised his classmates for their "emotional intelligence, how connected they are with the vocabulary surrounding mental health, which is amazing and was not the case when I was younger, the progressiveness of them all in terms of LGBT rights and just the normality around that, which just wasn't around when I was a teenager."
As Stephen gears up to see the documentary premiere on RTÉ One tonight, he admitted that "I've never been more nervous about anything" as he is about to share a whole year of his life with the nation.
"It's the only thing I've ever watched where I've seen all corners of my personality on it; the humour, the low points, the nerves, the knuckling down, the work, everything. It's got everything about me in it," he said.
Leaving Again airs on RTÉ One at 10.15pm on Thursday, September 20.
