A modest leader with the X Factor

John Carr, who powerfully condemned the Budget Education cutbacks on RTÉ radio yesterday morning, is a fisherman's son from Co Donegal. Imbued with a strong sense of social justice, he has been a key figure in Irish education for more than 30 years. He is also a former music impresario - and a poker shark, writes Louise Holden

HE COULD easily have been a judge on The X Factor, but John Carr opted to lead the primary teachers of Ireland instead. Now after seven years as general secretary of arguably the most formidable union in the country, Carr has announced that he is to retire from the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) at the end of next year.

Carr has been instrumental in every key educational campaign of the past three decades, starting with the 20,000-strong Croke Park pay rally of 1985. Since then, he has played a determining role in some of the watershed moments in Irish education, as well as featuring prominently in national wage negotiations of the past 10 years.

"A tough Donegal man," is how one former INTO leader describes him. The son of a poor fisherman from the small seaside village of Downings, Carr's unvarnished childhood imbued in him a lifelong concern with disadvantage. Scholarships secured his secondary and tertiary education; at age 12 he went away to Scoil Éanna in Galway, a gaelscoil and preparatory college for teacher training. From there, he proceeded to St Patrick's College of Education in Drumcondra, Dublin, where he happened upon several future luminaries in Irish education; Senator Joe O'Toole, Austin Corcoran, Gerry Malone, Donal O'Loinsigh, the late Peter McGrane and Alan Titley.

His skill at rallying the troops emerged early - but in the service of entertainment. "John led an unauthorised student social committee at St Pat's," Austin Corcoran, a former INTO president, recalls. "He organised Friday-night hops in the hall in Parnell Square and Sunday matinee dances in the Harcourt Ballroom. The girls from Carysfort Training College would come to Sunday-afternoon dances. Girls from the northside of the city would come on Friday nights." It was at a Friday-night hop that Carr met his Kilkenny wife, Joan, who was studying in Cathal Brugha Street.

According to Corcoran, Carr was in charge of hiring and firing bands - artists such as the Hustlers, Alan D and the Lighthouse and Phil Lynott passed through his hands in those days. "If he hadn't followed the teaching route, there would have been no need for Louis Walsh," says Corcoran.

Carr's commitment to life beyond the classroom amounted to more than student exuberance. He continued to patronise the Teachers' Club in Parnell Street after graduating from St Patrick's and throughout his 22-year career as a teacher and then principal at Scoil Eoin Baiste, Clontarf. When the club fell foul of the 1980s, Carr is said to have borrowed from the bank to save it - using his house as collateral. "I'm not sure if Joan was ever told about that," a club member and friend confided.

Carr's performance at St Pat's landed him an award for teaching practice and a plum job at one of the better-heeled schools on Dublin's northside. "The rest of us got jobs in Finglas and Ballymun. Clontarf would have been a dream start for any of us, but John would have aced the interview," says a former colleague.

Despite taking up a job in a relatively affluent neighbourhood, Carr has committed much of his working life to campaigning for the rights of students who are disadvantaged by circumstance, background or disability.

"In Downings in the 1950s, we were all equal, equally poor," Carr told an audience assembled to celebrate his induction as Donegal Person of the Year last January. "It was there we all went to the same school, invariably a run-down and neglected building where school funding was so negligible that children had to bring fuel to school and where the potential of children with disabilities went, to a large extent, unnoticed."

In 1989, Carr left Scoil Eoin Baiste and took up the position of education officer and assistant general secretary of the INTO. He worked closely alongside his college friend Joe O'Toole, who found him a tough negotiator, in the boardroom and at the poker table. "He'd squeeze the last ounce out of you," said O'Toole, independent Senator and former INTO general secretary. "We've been playing poker together for 40 years, but that doesn't make it any easier."

O'Toole has capitalised on Carr's talents, engaging him in every election campaign of the past 20 years. "The poker school we set up in 1966 is still going strong. We're boring old farts now," says O'Toole.

In 2001, Carr took up the position of INTO general secretary. He steered the union through major changes in Irish education, engendered by sweeping legislative changes in the Education Act. It was on his watch that educational infrastructure in Ireland began to flourish: he played his part in the establishment of the National Council for Special Education, the DEIS initiative for educational disadvantage, the Teaching Council and the Statutory Committee on Educational Disadvantage (the last a victim of Budget 2009).

Under Carr, the INTO successfully lobbied for hundreds of additional special-education posts and successive Benchmarking Body pay awards for teachers.

"He was, for many years, a school principal, and he never forgot that," said a former colleague. "He is passionate about the need for principals to be leaders, to be given the opportunity to lead the school community. He represents teachers, but he acts on behalf of the whole community."

The INTO has presented a unified, dignified face to the public under Carr. His team-building skills have inspired the loyalty that has helped the union to campaign credibly on issues close to Carr's heart.

At just 62 years of age, he is likely to remain a very public figure after he leaves the INTO, as his reach extends beyond education into finance, disadvantage and development aid. He is a director many times over; of Comhar Linn INTO Credit Union, the Northside Partnership and the Northside Centre for the Unemployed. He is a member of the governing body of UCD and as soon as his planned retirement became public, he was approached to take up a directorship at Trócaire.

"His favourite saying is that he wants the INTO to be vision-led, rather than problem-driven," says Peter Mullan, INTO press officer and Carr's right-hand-man. "Believe me, his organisation may be vision-led, but his desk is problem-driven. If he has a fault, it is that he always plays to win."

Useful information if you ever infiltrate St Pat's poker school.

He still has a year to go as general secretary - and what a year. It will take a tough Donegal man to keep INTO priorities on the map in 2009. One of the union's central platforms under Carr has been the need to reduce class sizes in primary schools. In last week's ravaging Budget, the Government moved to reverse the gains of the last decade, cutting the number of teachers by 400 against a backdrop of rising enrolments in primary schools.

As a result, Irish classrooms will now be the most overcrowded in the EU. There is speculation that the INTO may be about to kick off a national protest campaign.

Carr has described the move as "a savage attack on primary education". On past form, his counter-attack may be equally savage and effective.

JOHN CARR ON DOEGAL

EARLIER this year, John Carr was named Donegal Person of the Year, an honour he shares with Daniel O'Donnell, Bríd Rodgers and Packie Bonner. Speaking at the event, he revealed some landmarks on his personal journey.

"Though I left my native county as a youth to make my journey in this world, throughout my life I have been drawn to my roots, my townland of Gortmore, my village of Downings, my county of Donegal. It is this constant drawing back that sustains me, regularly rejuvenates me and keeps my feet firmly on the ground."

"As a young student of primary teaching, I spent summers working in London, where I met many in exile, living on dreams of hope and little else. Many of those who stayed behind fared little better.''

"As a young teacher in Dublin, I saw the challenges posed by poverty, exclusion and unemployment, often through the lens of Dublin classrooms. Those were realities that reawakened by sense of community forged in by formative years in Donegal, and I found a home for it in the trade union movement."

LOUISE HOLDEN