THE funding of the segregated school system in Northern Ireland should be "conditional on cross-community contact taking place", the INTO general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole, told the conference.
In a hard-hitting speech, Senator O'Toole said the funds for the schools cross-community contact scheme must be increased. "For this year it is only Pounds 1.1 million; for next it is going to be increased by the miserable amount of Pounds 30,000. This is no more than a drop in the ocean. If we cannot make these pupils talk to each other, we are dead in the water.
"Fewer than half of all Northern Ireland schools are involved in cross- community contacts. There is a huge challenge for us - we must eliminate fear of difference and tribalism. We must step beyond the accommodation of difference and create an inclusive society."
The INTO organises primary school teachers in the Republic and mainly teachers from Catholic schools in the North.
He said few people understood the scale of the impact of the Troubles on schoolchildren. "In many highly disadvantaged areas pupils must go to and from school each day by taxi, for security reasons. In other areas there will be security checks or searches on the way to school.
"The teachers, staff and parents of the school where the terrorists dumped an unstable bomb were left with a crater where their school used to be." Only last week, he said, a rocket attack on the RUC had led to a primary school being hit.
"The unrest creates constant problems of the most unnerving and stressful kind. As one teacher put it to me: 'When you have had to sit at gunpoint in the staff room while terrorists are teaching bomb-making down in the school lab, then you might begin to understand the depth of the problem'."
He said the Education for Mutual Understanding programme was "good and positive" but its impact was "very limited". A soccer match between segregated schools could be arranged, but parents would quickly object to a cricket or Gaelic football match,