Twenty years ago, thousands of teachers marched to Croke Park after the government refused to honour a pay award. Lousie Holden remembers when the three teaching unions came together to make history.

It was the largest trade union demonstration in European history. The official headcount was 20,000 - participants insist it was closer to 30,000. Twenty years ago this week teachers of every union persuasion assembled in Croke Park to protest at the Government decision not to honour an independent arbitration award of a 10 per cent increase in teachers' salaries. Under the banner of Teachers United, the three unions - the INTO, TUI and ASTI - spoke with one voice and were supported by parents, politicians and the public.

"It was a massive operation," Senator Joe O'Toole, a protest committee member on the day, recalls. "We handed CIE a cheque for the hire of every available train and commissioned the building of a new stage with its own lighting and audio system in Croke Park. There were no mobile phones around then so we set up a communications system using shortwave radio. Twenty thousand was the official tally, but there were nearly 40,000 members in the three unions and I've never met a teacher of the time who wasn't there."

The build-up to the protest began in August of that year, after a three-year-old claim for a special pay rise for teachers finally resulted in the recommendation of a 10 per cent pay hike by an independent arbitrator. Money was tight at the time, but the arbitrator insisted that the merit of the teachers' claim trumped Exchequer constraints.

The situation began to warm up in August, when a copy of the arbitrator's draft report was leaked to the media. The minister for education at the time, Gemma Hussey, was quick to declare that the award would not be paid. She told RTÉ's Morning Ireland radio programme that payment of the teachers' award would mean that the Government's public service pay policy would be "seriously breached" and that the award "simply can't be paid".

Events were ignited on the night of August 19th when Hussey told a meeting of Young Fine Gael it was "vital that all those organisations who publicly clamour for increases should address themselves to the morality of what they are about."

This was a loaded phrase. Teachers objected to the suggestion that they were "publicly clamouring" for an increase when they had been through process of arbitration. Irish teachers had not taken strike action since 1946, the unions said. The use of the word "morality" left many teaching union members inflamed.

The result, two months later, was a series of one-day strikes which closed schools throughout the State. The November 6th strike in Dublin saw every school in the county closed except for two primary schools. That day of action was the first in a cascade of closures, region by region, culminating in the unprecedented gathering at Croke Park. The withering remarks of Gemma Hussey and other ministers of the day were catalysts in the action, but there was more to Teachers' United than hurt feelings.

"We had a hard message to impart that day," says Bride Rosney, an erstwhile TUI executive and now director of communications at RTÉ. "We were determined to protect the status of teachers in Ireland from the kind of assault that was taking place in Britain at the time."

Kieran Mulvey was general secretary of the ASTI at the time and he still marvels at the extraordinary show of unity that the protests engendered. "Teachers United indicated clearly to the government of the day that we would stand by the conciliation and arbitration process," says Mulvey, now chief executive of the Labour Relations Commission. "We were absolutely determined that the deterioration of the teacher's status that was taking place under Thatcher in Britain would not be replicated here.

"We were a powerful lobby at the time because we worked together. It has always been a regret of mine that we missed that opportunity to reunite the teachers' unions permanently."

The three teachers' unions have not allied on that scale since, and one, the ASTI, has since left the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu).

Many of those involved in the protest were inspired to look at new models of social partnership for Ireland, Mulvey contends. "The events leading to Teachers United and the protests themselves convinced me and others that a new approach was required," he says. "It's fair to say that the dispute fed directly into the PEP talks of the late 1980s and the models of social partnership we have today."

John Carr, now general secretary of the INTO, remembers the day with fondness. "For us, it was a historic return to the 1946 half-time pitch invasion of Croke Park during the All-Ireland final. We were fighting for salaries then too. This time, the logistics were considerable. The whole area around Croke Park had to be cordoned off as hundreds of buses were brought in bringing teachers from all over the country."

Fiona Poole, a former ASTI president, was responsible for the 30,000 bread rolls buttered and stuffed at 5am on the cold grounds of Croke Park. "After that day it was a long time before I could face a ham sandwich again," she admits.

Carr was part of a team responsible for logistics and equipment - staging and sound were critical components of the protest. "We had speeches on the day from the three union presidents, the general secretaries, and representatives from the World Confederation of the Teaching Profession, Ictu and the Public Services Committee. The day of protest, and the series of school closures building up to it, really galvanised the troops and built up the fabric of the unions creating a new generation of activists. The questions now is, is it time for another one?"

Mulvey wonders if such a performance could be repeated in the era of public partnership. "It was the last great public demonstration of union strength. It would take an extraordinary event to bring about such a movement again."