`The Government has no interest in starting a war with anyone, least of all these children's teachers." The Taoiseach's emollient words last November a few days before the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland began its industrial action, sent out a clear message: we are not spoiling for a fight.
But the Taoiseach, as someone who witnessed close up the bruising battles with the teacher unions in the 1980s, must have realised that war was likely to be the favoured tactic of ASTI. He must have known what lay ahead.
As the second largest of three teacher unions, the overwhelmingly middle-aged membership of the ASTI lived through the 1980s too, and would remember the almost legendary persecution of successive Ministers for Education by ASTI and other unions. In those heady days teacher' conferences were likened to a form of blood sport, where teachers travelled for hundreds of miles to see the Minister get a roasting.
So last November when it came to planning strikes for 2000, ASTI members hoped to replicate this kind of relentless political pressure. If it worked then, why not now, some of the union's foot soldiers asked.
ASTI members, some of them directly involved in the 1980s battles, believed - with some justification - that Ahern's Government would bend in the way that Haughey and FitzGerald governments did before.
As one leaked ASTI document also pointed out: "The fact that the Government would be nearer to a general election is an argument in favour of planning a campaign of industrial action to culminate with a threat to the Leaving Cert 2001."
However, when ASTI officials sat down in November to plan their campaign, times had changed. The status of teaching, once unassailable, was now under threat. The cornerstones of that status - job security and higher-level education - were no longer holding their value.
Job security was becoming irrelevant in a labour market where employers were having problems getting people, never mind getting rid of them. Also, with the educational attainment of the whole population rising, being a graduate no longer conferred any great privileges.
Because of this drop in status and political clout, teachers were always going to find it hard to put Ahern's Government under the kind of pressure exerted back in the '80s. While teachers remain an important constituency for Fianna Fail, the Taoiseach took a gamble on the wider public backing his tough stance.
In the two opinion polls taken during the dispute the gamble appeared to pay off - with teachers taking most of the flak for the deadlock in the dispute. The most important constituency in the dispute were parents. The Taoiseach and his advisers knew this group could make or break the Government's uncompromising strategy.
Initially, the picture here was mixed. The National Parents' Council (post primary) - theoretically representing all parents with children in second level - tried to sit on the fence. It said it was "concerned" about the dispute, but stopped short of an outright condemnation of ASTI's tactics.
With the official parents' group refusing to play the blame game, the Taoiseach could not be certain which way the public mood would swing. However, the initial phase of industrial action handed the Government a public relations victory.
ASTI decided not to strike in the normal fashion, but to withdraw supervision instead. This meant hundreds of schools were forced to close. Teachers said the withdrawal of supervision was necessary to highlight how they had provided the service for years without payment.
However, the public could not understand why the union would not just strike in the accepted fashion. They could understand picket lines, but many people could not understand why teachers were sitting in empty classrooms while children were at home.
The use of supervision withdrawal gave the Government the first of many chances to call ASTI's bluff. It said it would pay parents to supervise in schools instead of teachers.
This appeal to the vital parents' constituency paid off - ASTI warned that any school which used parents or outsiders would face recrimination when the dispute was over. The Government's move pitted ASTI against parents.
This motif of angry and distressed parents being frustrated by uncaring teachers was established and was highly damaging to ASTI's chances of winning the dispute and giving the Taoiseach a bloody nose.
By November 28th the die was cast. "Parent group breaks ranks to go against ASTI action," read the headline. It heralded a crucial decision by the influential Congress of Catholic Secondary School Parents Associations to oppose ASTI fiercely, eventually leading their spokeswoman, Barbara Johnston, to describe them as "terrorists" - language which shocked many people.
Soon parents were on the march and ASTI were on the back foot. The Taoiseach and the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, started to court the other teacher unions, increasingly isolating the ASTI. The benchmarking body was changed so it became more appealing to the TUI and INTO.
Just when the ASTI was feeling lonely and eager to come in from the cold, the Government made a huge blunder by docking teachers' pay in the middle of sensitive negotiations to solve the dispute.
Things started to get out of control, but the Taoiseach re-entered the dispute in an article in The Irish Times on January 16th.
He included in his article a reference to a "power struggle" within the ASTI. His comments immediately focused attention on the personalities within ASTI and their uneasy relationship. He also neatly sidestepped the question of whether teachers deserved a rise or not. It was about using the official mechanisms to get one, he emphasised.
Throughout the next few weeks the Taoiseach emphasised that the State's industrial relations machinery such as the benchmarking body) was where the ASTI claim should be decided. He rarely got bogged down in the rights and wrongs of the 30 per cent figure.
By doing this he was able to shift the debate onto ASTI versus the other publicsector unions who were embracing concepts such as benchmarking. Thus the perception was that it was not the Government versus ASTI, but ASTI versus everyone else.
The exams withdrawal was ASTI's final attempt to make the Government cave in. But once again the Government appealed to parents.
It recruited thousands of supervisors - many of them parents - to stage the exams. Some ASTI members walked into the trap of alienating the parents again, by describing them as "scabs" and "strike breakers" on the national airwaves. This allowed the Government to pose as the defender of students and the ASTI to be portrayed as ruthless and inflexible.
When the Government showed no sign of buckling, the ASTI campaign finally ran out of options. Younger and part-time teachers became worried about losing important exam income, while dedicated teachers recoiled at the idea of damaging their students in the most cruel way - by disrupting the exams.
Mr Ahern had survived. At least for now.