Inevitably, the final year of university is a year of uncertainty for many undergraduates. Most students are of an age when the evolution of maturity and developments in personal relationships are at a dynamic and difficult phase. Arts students in particular are concerned about the possibilities of future employment.

I found these complexities a burden. I felt my work towards the final examination had got off to a bad start and as I struggled through my reading programme I felt less and less prepared for the series of three-hour papers I would have to confront. I had not the slightest idea as to what career choice I should make. And, even though general employment prospects were such that it was extremely difficult for graduates to find immediate employment, I felt desperately that I must go straight from university into some kind of job.

There would be no pressure on me to leave home, but I did not want to step back from the independence I had enjoyed in College rooms. I saw myself in the not too distant future as a married man with a home, a family and a modest car. Clearly that could not be achieved without a secure, salaried post. Obtaining such a post would put me in a position to explore the possibility of a permanent relationship with a woman.

The final philosophy year in Trinity offered the option of a full examination programme or a partial examination programme complemented by the prior submission of a thesis. Because I did not like the proposed list of thesis topics and was uneasy, following my Metaphysical Society experience, about the prospect of a good result, I decided to take my degree exclusively by examination.

As time went on I regretted this decision and saw the virtues of having more focused goals and a less intense examination ordeal. To compound matters, I found that all my reading and thinking in the key areas of theory of knowledge and ethics kept coming back to two simple lines of approach which did not lend themselves to the preparation of exam answers. I found myself reducing almost all philosophical questions to an understanding of the use of language. It was not for philosophy to question common sense or science – although scientific findings must of course be open to falsifiability and to the tests of repeated observation and experiment – the basic philosophical challenge was to find ways of reconciling common-sense experience with scientific knowledge.

My ethical view was equally clear and simplistic. Yes, we know the difference between good and evil, and between behaving well and behaving badly, but these understandings do not have a scientific basis and may vary from culture to culture and society to society. Ethics is about the values of culture and society. The philosopher tries to explore and explain the values of one or more cultures or societies and seeks to draw conclusions as to the universality or relative merits of these values. I saw myself relating these approaches to the twenty or so questions I would have to address in the loneliness of the drab examination rooms and felt exhausted at the prospect. For me, a four-year undergraduate course was a year too long. My mediocre second-class honours result became inevitable.

While pushing myself through the painful months of seeking to understand a wide range of classical and contemporary philosophical writing, I found I still gave almost as much time to the Hist and to debating as if I had taken on one of the major offices of the society.

I did exceptionally well in being the only Irish individual speaker sent forward to the final of the Observer Mace in London but the prizes went to the top teams. My drive to find employment in advance of graduation happily proved successful, though there again I felt the outcome would probably be judged by many to fall short of my real potential.

As most of my classmates had joined the Mental and Moral course with ordination in mind, and I shared with them a solid Church of Ireland background, it was natural that I should ask myself whether or not I might have or be likely to discover a vocation to the priesthood. I knew what the life of a Dublin curate or rector would be like and thought I might be extremely good at preaching and conducting the liturgy. My reading of lessons at Christmas and special services had often been much admired and my knowledge of scouting could be a valuable introduction to work with young people. These very qualifications contributed to my final decision not to consider an application for entry to the Church of Ireland Training College and Divinity School.

The event which, paradoxically, pushed me to this decision was the interview at which I sought the advice of Desmond Murray, the Rector of Dalkey Parish, with whom I got on very well and who my mother had worshipped from afar since he appeared as a Curate in the Leeson Park parish of her youth. Desmond Murray was positive and warm in his advice. “Yes, you have the ideal family background,” he concluded. That was it. No consideration at all was given to what should be the central issue: “How do you know whether or not you have a vocation?”

The other obvious question I had to answer definitively, even though my choice of degree course had already suggested a negative disposition, was whether or not I should consider following my late father into the law. Here my decision-making was heavily influenced by short-term and ill-informed considerations. I could not face up to the immediate prospect of further study, including preparation for an examination in the Irish language. For no good reason, my image of legal practice related exclusively to the apparently dull lives of my father and his solicitor friends. That was not a life to which I could see myself apprenticed. The quite different challenge of life as an advocate at the Irish bar never entered my mind.

With the obvious options dismissed, I decided to enter as enthusiastically as I could into the interviews available through what the College’s Careers and Appointment Office called “the milk round”. Trinity’s reputation as the Oxbridge of Ireland meant that most of the potential employers of graduates who made annual recruiting tours to British Universities included TCD on their visits list.

The recruitment procedure followed a well-established pattern. With the help of the Appointments Office one decided which potential employees seemed of most interest and an application form was completed. On the basis of that application one might or might not be interviewed by the visiting recruiter. Following that interview one might or might not be invited to a final interview at the employer’s UK Headquarters. The Appointments Officer could be helpful as the process advanced or stalled in suggesting what had been perceived as positive or negative factors by the visiting employers.

I had a go at a range of industrial and business employers with strong personnel or promotional sectors and applied for the two BBC traineeships on offer (a General Traineeship or a more specific Trainee Studio Manager post) and to Westminster Press Provincial Newspapers, then the UK’s major local newspaper group. Both invited me for interview on their Dublin visit. I was called to London for interview by the BBC, as a Trainee Studio manager, and by the Westminster Press.

All these procedures were spread out over the period from May to September and involved a lot of time and nervous energy. It was disappointing to me, having also made direct application to a number of potential Irish employers, including the completion of a form for posts in RTÉ, the newly launched national television service, that I was never accorded a home interview.

In the first interview offered by the Westminster Press I had found the company’s personnel officer, Philip Duncum, a congenial and sympathetic interviewer. At the first interview in London, which was before a board including the group’s Chief news editor, I felt I was likely to be offered a three-year editorial traineeship. Since this looked likely to be my last and best hope of getting a job through the milk round, when asked, “Have you any preference as to where you would like to work?”, I immediately replied that I would be quite happy to work wherever traineeships might be available.

When the Westminster Press offer arrived just ahead of my examination results, it was to offer me a place from mid-October with the Blyth News. No one I knew, including myself, had ever heard of Blyth, a Northumberland town in England’s North-East, which research revealed to be a major coal producer and exporter. The port of Blyth, just North of the better-known ports of the nearby Tyne estuary, was at that time the port handling the largest coal export tonnage in Europe, a title challenged only by some even more obscure Polish port.

By Christmas Eve, when I looked down from the upper deck of the mailboat – which was packed with returning emigrants – at the dockers who were mooring the ship to Dun Laoghaire’s Carlisle pier, I realised that in my three months with the Blyth news, and living in digs with Mr and Mrs Wilf Taylor in their small terraced brick seaside house at Seaton Sluice, a quarter of an hour from Blyth Market Place on my moped, I had learnt more than in all my years of education. I understood how difficult it was to write quickly, clearly, simply and accurately. I knew that many of the best and brightest people I could hope to meet might have little education, no ambition, and no pretension to what I would normally regard as taste or culture. Most of what made people remarkable seemed to be warmth and enthusiasm and a preparedness to work at whatever it was might interest or concern them most. Many might regard Wilf Taylor as almost a caricature commercial traveller, Andy Easton, a massive former dock policeman, could seem laughable as a chief reporter, Eddie Milne, MP, might seem a pigmy successor at Westminster to the legendary Alf Robens, but all were people I was delighted to have got to know and respect and from whom I hoped to learn a great deal.

I suppose that I owe my traineeship in part to the curriculum vitae mention of my time with Trinity News and the portfolio of cuttings I submitted to the Westminster Press. What a thin portfolio it was, fortunately including an editorial, a short news item, and a by-lined piece – my only by-lined piece – about a police raid on the offices of “The Starry Plough”, the newspaper of Noel Browne’s National Progressive Democrat party. Work on that article, and another unpublished political article, had given me my first contact with government and political parties.

I was not to know how significant in the years ahead a visit to the Fianna Fáil Party’s Headquarters to interview its General Secretary, Senator Thomas Lincoln Mullins, would prove to be.

There was one Trinity News cutting, which I treasure, but which could not be part of my portfolio. In my last term, jointly with my friend Jack Daniels, I had been given the accolade of a personality profile, written by Edna Broderick, a Dalkey girl, who had also become a Scholar and a Trinity News staff member. (Edna is now internationally known as the critic Edna Longley, having married another College contemporary, today the outstanding Northern Ireland poet, Michael Longley.) Her prediction for the two final year philosophy students profiled was that, whatever our pretensions to patriotism, we would both most likely find that our best career opportunities lay away from home.

Read more: 1962 – From Blyth to South Shields