In terms of damaging the Government, this week's withdrawal of teachers from supervisory duties passed off without causing too many complications. Emmet Oliver examines the union's options now
This week's withdrawal from supervision by members of the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland began with dire warnings of what might happen in schools. Chaos. Massive indiscipline. Widespread disruption.
These were just some of the horrors which some headlines suggested would be visited upon hundreds of second-level schools.
While a handful of schools did not open for a day or two, the throwing of sandwiches in a school yard in Ballyhaunis appeared to be about the nearest we came to chaos.
Obviously, it is early days yet. Schools will come under increasing strain over the next few weeks as the orals and practicals take place.
But the breakdown in order would need to be on a big scale for it to be representative of anything more than the cut-and-thrust of ordinary school life.
"Incidents happen in schools all the time. It is only in the current circumstances that they are being magnified," said one observer this week.
However, if there are problems, somebody is going to get the blame, and it is either going to be the Government or the ASTI.
The withdrawal, ASTI leaders insist, was never meant to cause widespread disruption or chaos anyway.
To be fair to Charlie Lennon, the union's general secretary, it was made quite clear to members that they should not obstruct attempts by school management to keep schools open.
SO what was it for? Few in the ASTI appear to know. The more hawkish members say it was a superfluous distraction from the union's main 30 per cent pay claim, while the doves say it was foisted upon them by the hardliners.
Almost everyone in the ASTI this week said it had nothing to do with the general issue of teachers' pay.
In terms of damaging the Government, it was practically worthless.
Most Government Ministers spent the week campaigning on the abortion referendum or dealing with the latest twist in the national stadium fiasco.
The corridors of the Dáil were not reported to be buzzing with talk of the ASTI action.
Even the incidents in the west were placed way down the media agenda and by the end of the week virtually all schools were operating normally.
Once again the ASTI had taken action and once again it failed to deliver a brass farthing for its 17,000 members. Even its president, Catherine Fitzpatrick, admitted at the end of the week that the union had to find strategies which were successful.
Her comment - "We need to step back and devise a strategy which has the potential to be successful" - packed a punch, because Fitzpatrick was once regarded as a hardliner in the union who fervently believed that serious conflict with the Government, rather than benchmarking, was the best way to get results.
The union had hoped that this week's events would at least highlight the voluntary work done by teachers in schools.
This work is the lifeblood of schools and without teachers many pupils would never be able to cut a dash on sports day or make an insightful contribution during their school debate.
But nobody was talking about any of this during the week. The action by the ASTI was only news in the sense of how it impacted on pupils and their parents.
THIS happened last year also during the ASTI strike, when the union's tactics meant most public debate was about whether the union was justified in taking strike action. The actual issue of teacher's pay was often only mentioned in passing.
This is always the way with industrial action. The industrial action itself becomes the focus of debate, not the issues which originally prompted it.
But the ASTI, because of its willingness to hit schools directly, has made it even more unlikely that the true issues in this dispute are going to get aired.
Even within the union, these questions and other more unsettling ones are being raised.
While the union time and time again stands on principle and keeps its virtue intact, what is actually happening in terms of teachers' pay?
Despite the last 2½ years of conflict with the Government, ASTI members have not gained a single penny on top of the money all public sector workers got through the PPF.
In fact, if you look at part-time teachers, a case could be made that ASTI members have lost out because of recent action.
Part-timers would have made plenty of money if they were allowed to do the supervision work during the past week. But the directive from their union did not allow this, except in very limited circumstances.
Other money the union missed out on last year was the €2,222 (£1,750) offered as part of the Labour Court settlement in March.
The union also has spurned the €34 per hour offer for doing supervision. Instead, it has told its leaders that they cannot even try to improve this figure through negotiations with the Government.
As the strategy of the union is set to continue until the benchmarking report comes out in June, members may begin to seriously question whether teachers the themselves are the ones who are really suffering, not the Government.