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Ireland's big school secret: how a year off-curriculum changes teenage lives

The transition year led Paul Mescal and Cillian Murphy to become actors – and has had similarly seismic effects on thousands of secondary school students. Should other countries follow suit?

Cillian Murphy also became an actor during his TY, via a theatre workshop that not only fostered a passion for the stage but introduced him to the artistic director Pat Kiernan, who later cast him in his breakthrough production, Disco Pigs. It was the brainchild of Richard Burke, a passionate internationalist who joined the Fine Gael party to deepen Ireland’s relationship with Europe, but arguably made his greatest impact with his maverick views on education and child development. Photograph: Bríd O’Donovan/The GuardianThe pilot scheme was enough of a success that the government put some money behind it in the 1990s – approximately £50 a student, Jeffers remembers – and it was expanded to almost every school, to considerable resistance from educators, who thought parents wouldn’t have it, which initially they didn’t.

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