More comments from Transition Year students who have won a week's work placement in The Irish Times. To join them, send us a 200-word piece on a media-related topic.Des Ryan, The High School, Rathgar, Dublin
More than 65,000 students will begin their Leaving Cert exams in just under five months' time. Even as a Transition Year student, it is perfectly clear to me that the mass media has already begun to make a field-day of this fact.
Apart from top-quality journals like The Irish Times and the helpful advice it contains, the vast majority of newspapers plummet to ridiculous depths each year in an obvious attempt to gain young - and extremely naive - readers. Who in their right and stable mind could possibly be anxious to obtain copies of articles such as "101 Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them"? The Leaving Cert is a stressful enough time for most students, who do not need (or want) the pressure exacerbated by idiotic journalism and cheap reporting of this nature. As if all the pre-exam hype were not painful enough, students must then be bombarded with the rigamarole of "analysing the papers". The real paradox is that these crass media outlets never actually analyse their own papers - if they did, maybe we could be spared even a fraction of this drivel.
Mary O'Halloran, Dominican College, Griffith Avenue, Dublin
Despite a Christmas of record-breaking consumer spending, the public are tripping over themselves to hand over more of their cash, fuelled by the Government's hype of the "Celtic Tiger". There seems to be an optimism that financial situations are going to improve and we will all benefit from Ireland's affluence. However, in reality many of the ordinary people, those who created the current boom, have yet to be bitten by the "tiger".
Cleverly coined phrases such as this have instilled false hopes in the public and led many to spend far more than they normally would during the festive season. Sadly and inevitably, this roaring economy will slump and those who did not feel the benefits of its success will suffer the pinch of its failure the most.
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