Delegates nearly turned their frustration at the pension levy and cuts against the top table
LIKE THE 100-year-old Galway woman asked to hand over her medical card this month, the ASTI did not expect to celebrate its centenary year with a 10 per cent pay cut.
The sense of shock and disbelief at this month’s conference is making it difficult for secondary teachers to coalesce around a course of action.
As the only union without a declaration of war on the table yesterday, ASTI members sent their standing committee packing, charged with producing a motion they could take back to the seething staff rooms of Ireland.
Despite the very public calls for a declaration of war on the pension levy issue, delegates privately detect little appetite for a strike. School closures are unpalatable to all but the most radical delegates.
Today’s morning session will be an exploration of the measures still available to teachers if school closures are deemed too hot to handle.
Meanwhile, there has been much discussion in Killarney about who is to blame for bringing the union to its “darkest hour in 100 years”.
Every flavour of public figure has been hauled into the ring this week: Irish Nationwide’s Michael Fingleton, Batt O’Keeffe, RTÉ’s Pat Kenny, Anglo Irish Bank’s Seán FitzPatrick, the Ictu’s David Begg and the ASTI’s own John White.
Attacks on the top table brought back memories of the bad old days of the ASTI but the union pulled itself together yesterday and will attempt to agree on a common enemy and a common course of attack, away from the eye of the media, today.
There is a palpable feeling of hurt among delegates at the way that teachers have been portrayed in the media and the perceived attempt by the unknown enemy to divide and conquer.
Public is pitched against private, young teachers against old, union against union and members against executive, they say.
John White expressed the mood yesterday when he said that teachers and civil servants were being made to feel as if they are “parasites, sucking the life blood out of the community”.
Bernard Lynch drew applause for his commitment to turn off his radio for good. “All I ever hear is my job, and my contribution to society, smeared and tossed around in the mud by Pat Kenny and Marian Finucane.
“We are portrayed as a parasitic and sub-human species.”
Delegate Ruth Coppinger attempted to soothe the hurt by reminding delegates of the futility of looking for love.
“Everyone loves the nurses but where has it got them? Nowhere.”
The ASTI are sick, they say, of having their anger managed by Ictu.
They will spend this morning trying to fashion that anger into a suitably devastating weapon. The challenge will be deciding where to aim it, because a misguided missile could leave the teachers feeling very unloved indeed.
