Calls for Government departments to provide more support to staff assaulted at work and to extend assault leave to workers, like school secretaries who are not covered in the event of injury, has been backed by Fórsa delegates.
The union’s conference in Killarney heard about a school secretary in Cork who was off work without pay following an assault by an intruder who got into her office.
Victoria Luke, also a school secretary, said not all of the incidents would be regarded as assaults but can involve children with additional needs unintentionally hurting staff when they become upset or agitated.
She experienced this at her school where she was pinned to a wall for a time during an incident in which a special needs assistant and the school principal were injured.
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“The child was young but they were big and very strong and they were lashing out. I was thinking, ‘they’re going to hit me’ - and I’m an ex-A and E nurse who was assaulted when I was doing that job so it wouldn’t have been the first time.”
A Special Needs Assistant (SNA) colleague, she said, ended up with a shoulder injury that required her to go to the emergency department and the principal was kicked in the leg. However, Luke said in the end the pupil calmed down and she was not hurt.
“The teachers and SNAs have a harder time of it generally and in that instance I was able to tell the child their mother was coming to get them and that relaxed them a bit.”
Luke said that if she had been hurt while trying to do her job and her best for a child, however, her only entitlement to paid leave would have been 10 days of statutory sick pay.
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“There’s no assault leave, no critical illness, no bereavement leave … we’re the poor relations. And so if you get belted, you haven’t a chance. You’re going to be on unpaid leave if you’re out.”
However, the issue is not unique to school settings, the conference heard.
The union is about to conduct a survey of its members working in the children’s residential care settings regarding their experiences as frontline staff in the Department of Social Protection, who say they are acutely aware of the potential dangers of dealing face-to-face with clients who are vulnerable or marginalised, sometimes with addiction issues.
The number of assaults on staff working for the department increased from 19 in 2024 to 22 last year and the department recently revealed details of one incident in which a client had first verbally abused staff in an office then thrown a full stoma bag at them.
Majella Murphy, who works for the department in Cork and is a member of the union’s civil service divisional executive, said one of the challenges involved was a shift over time in the way things are done so that “you don’t get to go down to your local office to fill out your forms and have somebody help and advise you of the best way to answer”.
Frustration, she suggested, can build up and by the time a person gets to deal with someone face-to-face they can quickly get worked up when things don’t go as hoped.
“In reality then, we’re the people who end up saying no, perhaps because a form hasn’t been filled out correctly or because they have come to us when really their problem is with another department entirely and we are not in a position to help them. We can do so much and no more.
“One of the recent assaults,” she says, involved a person “who just came in looking for a cheque, didn’t want to fill out a form or tell us why they wanted the money. They just very quickly became aggressive although some drugs might have been involved in that.”
One colleague, she mentioned, was recently assaulted for the second time in just six weeks. She says staff can often feel unsupported or even blamed when such incidents occur.
The conference passed motions calling for the establishment of better support structures and help with reporting incidents the An Garda Síochána but rejected a suggestion that assaulting a public servant in the course of their work should lead to a longer sentence.
