Diarmaid Ferriter: Teaching unions must unite on pay

The teachers’ conferences during the week revolved around demands for equality. The two-tier salary scales for teachers are doing great damage to the teaching profession and the education system.

In response, Minister for Education Richard Bruton has said "equality is fine in theory" but he has a bigger balancing act to perform. If this issue is not rectified, however, teaching conference motions will move from theoretical to real, with serious societal consequences.

Teachers at all levels have a particular balancing act to perform: to safeguard teachers' welfare and to promote the interests of those they serve. They have sought to achieve that balance for decades. Sixty years ago, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation was licking its wounds following the end of its strike the previous year, which had lasted from March to October. As an unprecedented strike by Irish white-collar workers it caused great consternation and was loaded with politics and religion. It generated fury within the Fianna Fáil government and had, initially, the blessing of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid, who assured the teachers that "the religious superiors have full sympathy with the ideal of a salary in keeping with the dignity and responsibility of your professions as teachers".

The roots of the strike lay in consternation about educational policy and pay scales, though the Minister for Education Tomás Derrig preferred to suggest in a private letter to McQuaid that the INTO was “so lacking in responsibility as to allow their profession to become a play thing in the hands of irresponsible groups”.

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Passive-aggressive

The strike mainly affected Dublin, with 124 schools closed and 49,000 children out of school. By October, with no prospect of resolution, McQuaid, in his usual passive-aggressive manner, invited the teachers “to be good enough to consider the advisability of returning to work” in consideration “of the welfare of the children”. The defeated teachers returned to their classrooms. But the strike laid the groundwork for the INTO’s emergence as an increasingly powerful force; it had learned much about strategy and organisation, possibilities and limitations and the need to navigate the parameters of the church-state relationship.

While the INTO was recovering, it published A Plan for Education, a remarkably progressive booklet, asserting among other things that there could be no equality of educational opportunity as long as formal education for the vast majority of children ended in primary school. It criticised the academic bias of the primary and secondary school curricula and the notion that artisanship and craftsmanship were somehow inferior, and called for proper educational research and adult education. It also wondered whether there was satisfaction that “our exiles must always be the hewers of wood and drawers of water in other lands?”. It insisted on the need for a Council of Education, inclusive of parents, and a four-year teacher-training course as well as making a plea for science education.

Tension

The battles over salaries continued in subsequent decades, causing tension between the INTO and the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI). In 1967 Minister for Education Donogh O’Malley established a tribunal on the issue which recommended a common basic salary, a development much desired by the INTO. The ASTI deemed it unacceptable and revised proposals were made which were unacceptable to the INTO. There were industrial disputes before new salary scales were devised and the principle of a common basic salary was established in 1971.

On the salary front, equality had been achieved but there was also a wider context to the equality battle. In the 1970s, according to historian and teacher Margaret MacCurtain, the question of education “now lies within the domain of justice”. The teaching unions were sometimes criticised for not wholly embracing this wider agenda.

Education journalist John Horgan suggested in 1973 that the INTO had been lulled into inaction by a smooth running salary and negotiating structure and that as a result it only intermittently "raised a sleepy eyelid to gaze at the world around it". There were also divisions and generational tensions within the ASTI about its industrial relations strategy. But in subsequent decades motions before all the teachers' conferences underlined how, along with the pay and conditions of its members, equality in education and by extension, societal equality, was central to their concerns.

Shared concerns

Given their shared concerns and the lessons of previous disunity, teachers’ unions need to be united in how they approach both the pay issue and their wider focus on fairness. Quite rightly, there is a particular onus on teachers to emphasise the importance of equality and to teach and communicate the need for it to their students. How deeply ironic then, that the teachers doing this are subjected to a two-tier pay system that is the complete antithesis of equality, and that so many of our unequal teachers feel they have no option but to emigrate, either to teach or perform the 21st century equivalent of the hewing of wood in foreign lands.