TEACHERS' UNION OF IRELAND:DELEGATES at the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) conference have rejected the proposed public sector reform and pay deal and have vowed to act independently of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) and the other teaching unions if necessary.
TUI delegates yesterday gave unanimous support to an emergency motion rejecting the deal negotiated by union leaders and employers at Dublin’s Croke Park convention centre last month.
The TUI, which represents post-primary teachers and third-level teachers, is the first union to recommend rejection of the proposed pay deal.
The motion also reserved the right of the TUI to act independently of Ictu or other groups.
The union will now ballot all of its 15,000 members, with a strong recommendation that the public service agreement should be opposed.
The Ictu executive was strongly criticised by TUI president Don Ryan, who described union leadership as “arrogant” and “out of touch”.
The 450 TUI delegates rose to their feet to applaud the president’s call for an outright rejection of the proposal. The documents themselves, he said, “are not worthy of discussion”.
The union’s annual conference, which opened yesterday in Ennis, heard that anything other than a rejection of the pay deal would represent the “total loss of our credibility as a trade union”.
In his opening address, TUI general secretary Peter MacMenamin called on delegates to focus their anger against a government that he described as “the most anti-worker government since the foundation of the State”.
He accused the Government of squandering the nation’s resources for generations into the future by distributing the personal debts of an elite few, resulting in a liability of €12,000 for every individual in the country.
“How is it that the funds for this bailout can be found with apparent ease yet staffing ratios must be cut in schools and colleges?” asked Mr MacMenamin.
“Why is it that this Government will allow the three or four senior executives of this bank to escape their responsibilities leaving behind their personal debts running to over €100 million to be picked up by the taxpayer while the books for schoolchildren are withdrawn and the pay of TUI members is cut to the bone and beyond?”
The cut in the school books grant represented a saving of €7.5 million per annum.
He compared the €22 billion to bail out Anglo Irish Bank to the €8 billion budgeted for education and asked if there was “something rotten in the state of Ireland”.
Mr MacMenamin also criticised the timing of the Croke Park negotiations, which he said should have taken place after increased pressure in the form of industrial action. He quoted an earlier statement in which he said the TUI does “not subscribe to the need for massive transformation in the education system in the direction being sought by government. The only transformation TUI wants to see is a transformation in the resources being allocated to education”. The only way to get back the “stolen money”, he said, was to engage in a “long series of hard actions, strike actions not ruled out”.
Minister for Education and Skills Mary Coughlan is scheduled to address the conference today.