ANALYSIS:Quinn's ministerial mantra that Ireland is in receivership left unions with no wriggle room
THEY SAID it couldn’t be done. A minister for education does the round of the three teacher union conferences, dishes out the bad news, tells teachers there is no money in the kitty before warning that further cuts are inevitable.
And he is still received warmly by delegates.
The new Minister has several advantages compared to his predecessors. For one, he is only six weeks into the job so he cannot be blamed for the accumulated grievances.
Second, he is the first Labour Minister for Education in a generation and that matters. Intuitively, most senior teacher union leaders are Labour leaning; few want to pick a row with the first Labour Minister in Marlborough Street since Niamh Bhreathnach in the mid-1990s.
But Quinn has also adopted a canny approach to the conferences.
Despite the anger of teachers over the cutbacks, the promotions embargo and the rest of it, he has placed himself firmly on the side of teachers this week. Ask him about special needs cutbacks or the appalling condition of many schools and he will say: “I feel your pain” or words to that effect.
On special needs, he has spoken about his strong empathy – as a parent and having grandchildren – with those brave parents campaigning for a decent education for their children. But he has also clearly and unambiguously said the cap on the number of special needs assistants will not be removed.
The number of special needs assistants has grown from a couple of hundred 15 years ago to more than 10,000, he explained. His message, despite all the plámás, is an uncompromising one: we need to do more with less.
Ruairí Quinn has also placed himself at one with a teaching profession weary of what it considers the demonisation of the public service.
During a lengthy, unscripted finale to his address at the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI), Quinn stood four-square behind teachers and the public service, telling delegates: “You do a magnificent job. You are frequently ignored. You are frequently undermined . . . but not by me.”
Warming to his theme, the Minister said all of us had been inspired by great teachers and by great teaching.
The teacher, he said, is often an inspiring figure. Looking across the huge conference centre he declared: “You are those guys and I salute you!”
In conclusion, he told an anecdote about how the civil rights movement had been a light in the darkness of a divided US society in the 1960s. The stars of the education system – the teachers before him – could do the same for this Republic.
Reflecting on all of this yesterday one ASTI delegate said: “At least the Minister did not insult – but neither did he do anything for us.” It was a correct assessment. Quinn gave no quarter to the teachers on the promotions embargo, on special needs, on the pupil-teacher ratio and more besides.
He rolled out the same mantra on three occasions – Ireland is in receivership; we have lost our economic sovereignty.
In response to this, the teacher unions have huffed and puffed all week. But they have little room for manoeuvre. All three unions have signed up to the Croke Park agreement on public service reform.
As one delegate noted, they can pass all the motions they like condemning the promotions embargo, it will not make a scrap of difference.
At the ASTI conference, various delegates demanded strong industrial action on this issue or that, only to be reminded that strike action is expressly forbidden by the Croke Park agreement.
At times this week, the ASTI conference in Cork has seemed like a meeting in search of an agenda.
There has been considerable and decent debate on a wide range of issues, but little sense that any of it actually matters, that anything said here will change things.
As he looked at his conference brochure, one delegate commented ruefully that “we are going through the motions, in every sense. I guess that’s what happens when you lose your economic sovereignty”.