Outgoing president says Minister still has to prove himself

The Minister for Education is good at "talking the talk" but has yet to prove that he can "walk the walk", the outgoing president of the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI), Mr Derek Dunne, has said.

Speaking on the eve of the Minister's visit to the TUI annual congress in Galway, Mr Dunne described Mr Dempsey, as being good at "raising new issues, reopening debates, suggesting half-baked ideas". The TUI remained to be convinced about the merit and wisdom of the so-called "Your Education System" (YES) consultative meetings which the Minister initiated recently, Mr Dunne said.

The "YES" public meetings on the future of education were an "excuse for inaction", the TUI president said. The McGuinness report, the Points Commission report and the report on the physical sciences were among the many studies and plans which had already been drawn up - and about which "nothing has been done", he said.

Even where new problems had been raised at the YES meetings - "which our Minister has sat diligently through" - it was not clear that solutions did or could emerge, Mr Dunne said. "There is no way around the careful consideration of education problems by those who know the system, who know what can be done and how it can be done," he said. Referring to the Minister's proposal that a YES style roadshow be held at the congress as a condition of his attendance, the TUI president said it was important to remember that trade union autonomy was hard won.

"Trade unions are independent of government," he said. "We will not accept dictation from any body as to how our conference is organised." In his wide-ranging address, Mr Dunne challenged the view that teacher unions did not represent the majority of teachers and lecturers. In an oblique reference to this week's criticism of the ASTI, he observed that many of the problems in teacher trade unions were due to apathy and the "use of outmoded methods of consulting members".

The TUI, representing 13,000 members in second and third-level must not allow this to happen, he said. Referring to league tables, Mr Dunne criticised an "unhelpful media" which justified publishing the list of schools sending the most students to college as "the public's right to know".

Publication was "done to sell newspapers, nothing else", he said. League tables had been banned in 1998 and should remained banned, and he questioned how two ministers from the same political party could espouse "radically different policies" on this issue.