Sir, - Garret FitzGerald (Opinion, April 7th) provided an excellent summary of the lessons to be learned from the teachers' strike. However, he stopped short of identifying the principal lesson that must be not only learned, but acted upon. This is that indefinite continuation of the PPF is not in the best interests of the country as a whole.
Dr FitzGerald draws the conclusion, apparently shared by students, parents, the general public and politicians (including the Minister of Education and the Taoiseach), that teachers must be paid considerably more if the quality of the education system is to be maintained. Yet, in spite of this unprecedented unanimity, it doesn't happen; and the only reason it doesn't happen appears to be that this would be incompatible with the PPF. Well, in my view, if the PPF says that all these people are wrong when it comes to teachers' pay, then the PPF is, as Dickens might have said, a ass.
This must induce us to recognise that the PPF is becoming an obstacle, a ball-and-chain, and that it has outlived its usefulness. Let's be clear: the PPF - and all such national pay-bargaining mechanisms - are very blunt instruments. They do not, and cannot, provide the subtlety of differentiation required to ensure that pay is compatible with long-term economic goals.
Most of us will recognise that, in the long term, some employment categories need to be encouraged, while others do not. If wagon-wheel makers had been awarded pay increases comparable to those of bankers over the past hundred years, we would now be stuck with a huge surplus of unsaleable wagonwheels.
Pay awards, in the medium to long term, must reflect economics, market conditions, technological developments and the general interests of the economy. That is why national paybargaining schemes such as the PPF, both in Ireland and abroad, work only in the short term. They place a restriction on the economy, analogous to putting a straitjacket on a child. The restriction, in due course, will distort the child's development.
The main lesson of the teachers' dispute is that the PPF is now distorting the wage landscape in an unnatural and unacceptable manner. It is time for it to go, to allow our national priorities to be reasserted. - Yours, etc.,
Dr Norman Stewart, Seapark, Malahide, Co Dublin.