Sir, – E Molloy (January 24th) inquires “is it too much to expect that the leaders of the teacher unions would encourage their members, who are taking early retirement with a generous exit package, to continue working until the end of the school year”.
I would rather choose to acknowledge and applaud retiring teachers who have worked unselfishly and beyond contract. So, I thank the teacher who taught me and my 45 classmates in a class room with a turf stove in a small west Limerick town and who worked extra hours to prepare us for scholarship exams and who gave of their free time to train us on the GAA pitches.
If these teachers plan on taking early retirement, they have more than served their time and I wish them well. E Molloy’s censure might be better directed at the Government and the Department of Education for their poor sense of human resource planning. – Yours, etc,