And was it good for you too?

PRP! Enough to draw forth a curse of the Bishop Cox variety on the mouth that would utter the blasphemous phrase. Performance related pay. If you can't perform, you shouldn't be a teacher. Aren't we always engaged in some sort of a performance - teachers, parents, inspectors. There's nothing amiss with our performances. And then of course the Plean Scoile and the Mor Thuaraisc - the cigire's way of discovering "Was it good for you too?".

But then Joe O'Toole reckons we could get paid for performing on a regular basis. And then when we get to like performing we won't want to stop. We'll be on the money merry-go-round and we'll never want to get off. Until we're hurled off at top speed praying that our salary protection covers nervous breakdowns brought on by Hyperactive Teacher Productivity Syndrome.

We could put on more extra-curricular activities, more meetings, more, more, more. We can earn brownie points for walking the walk. And they'll benchmark us with some other poor sod in the private sector who works just as hard as we do. Yeah, right. Let me know when you find him. And Joe will be the one who got all this for us. I'll bet he's sorry he gave up the classroom now. He could be PRPing instead of ICTUing now!

And we won't really be working that much harder! Forget about RSE, ICT, SPHE, SESE and any other acronym you want to dream up, that we have embraced grudgingly like a Yankee third cousin who has arrived unheralded on our doorstep. We don't want him but we'd feel churlish if we turned him away. Funnily, sweet FA is the only set of letters that has any ring of reality about them in the PRP money-go-round.

And it is slowly dawning on us, day by day, that we have waited too long to bell the cat. We are victims of our own professionalism (or naivete!) We haven't the ciall ceannaithe of our brothers in the Garda Sioch ana who cried "Enough! Now shag off!" (Or words to that effect.) We mumbled under our breaths and kept soldiering on.

We should have left the computers in the boxes, shunned the sex education and used the Walk Tall Programme to top up our own self-esteem. Have we a Pulse at all? How about adapting a bit of SUFO. A new set of letters for a new millennium. Any suggestions? Standing Up For Ourselves?