BROTHER Declan Duffy has been involved in virtually every major negotiation and development in Irish second level education over the past 20 years - the tortuous negotiations on community schools, boards of management for secondary schools lay principalships, the various teachers pay deals and attendant industrial action.

Even before he became the voice of secondary school management, he was involved on behalf of the religious orders in the negotiations on the introduction of boards of management into national schools.

He has been the general secretary of the Secretariat of Secondary Schools for almost 20 years. This is the body that represents both Catholic and Protestant secondary schools - and the one Jewish school - at State level; he is retiring from this job this summer.

He's worked with a dozen ministers for education, from Padraig Faulkner onwards, and probably has a better overview of their performance than anyone.

Which of the 12 stand out? "Gemma Hussey was a very hardworking minister, but most of her plans came to a halt under the onslaught of the teachers' pay dispute. But I'd have to say that the most knowledgable, the most accessible and the most formidable was Mary O'Rourke. She really understood the issues."

It was O'Rourke's misfortune to be in office at a time of considerable cutbacks, he says, but "she had a great way of obliterating the pain".

Joe Rooney, for many years his counterpart for VEC schools (as general secretary of the Irish Vocational Education Association) comes in for high praise as well. Even back when he was president of the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) he showed great courage on the community schools issue, and but for him I don't think that the issue would have been resolved so quickly." On the teacher union side, he thinks that Kieran Mulvey, while general secretary of the ASTI, served his members extremely well by being "a superb negotiator" in a series of handsome pay increases.

LOOKING BACK, Duffy identifies that development of community schools as the most significant educational turning point of the past 20 years.

The move away from totally religious controlled schools the multi denominational and coeductional element, the marrying of the vocational and academic tradition and the involvement of VECs with religious orders were all revolutionary in their time, he says.

"We forget how suspect even co education was at the time. I remember Tallaght Community School was originally planned as\two campuses, a male and a female one. Ballymun Comprehensive was originally built as two single sex schools."

The community schools have been a huge success, he says. He himself has served on the board of Tallaght Community School for 20 years and, despite being the main spokesman for voluntary secondary schools, has no hesitation in praising the work of community schools.

"When I think of the energy and time that went into negotiating the minutiae of the deeds of trust for these schools and the issues which so preoccupied us all, including the teachers unions, at the time . . ."

There was, for instance, the issue of reserved posts in the schools for members of religious orders. "That clause has never been invoked in 20 years. Not one single community school has filled its quota of reserved posts for religious." It was a "security which some people needed, he says.

The bishops? "Well, yes, and some religious orders too, worried about viability of their communities in some areas."

The infamous "faith and morals"; clause which was to apply to teachers in the schools generated a huge amount of controversy, too. "It ended up with the formulation that a teacher shall not advertently and consistently seek to undermine the religious beliefs or practice of any pupil."

He is not aware of that clause having been invoked either, and he wonders if the same formulation might not be useful in relation to the controversy over schools being given the right, under the proposed new Education Bill, to hire teachers who reflect the school's ethos. But be wonders if it isn't all just a paper exercise - as the reserved posts and faith and morals clauses proved to be.

DUFFY IS ALSO a fan of the VEC run community colleges, which are modelled very closely on the community schools.

"Bobby Buckley in County Cork VEC built some superb community colleges and Archbishop Dermot Ryan in Dublin embraced the ideal of the community college for Dublin." The involvement of the religious orders on both the community type schools "gave parents a sense of security", he argues.

"Between them the community schools and community colleges catered very well for the huge expansion in pupil numbers in the 1970s."

In that decade all the emphasis was on expansion, on building new schools as fast as possible to keep up with expanding pupil numbers. The 1980s was a decade of preoccupation with structures, with developing new ways to manage the schools. Boards of management were introduced in secondary schools; lay principals followed.

"But people were largely untrained and unprepared for this new involvement in management," he says. Board of management members had no preparation - "principals often went from teaching to running schools with no training in management."

Much of the work of his secretariat over the past decade has been in running intensive training courses in management and leadership for board members, principals, vice principals and post of responsibility holders.

"School principals are often very isolated. The level of demands on them has increased enormously. The religious principals at least had the support of a religious community."

It is very easy, he says, for a principal to just see her or himself as "an administrator rather than a manager and leader. It is so easy to bog down in the huge amount of administrative work. That is why a properly structured middle management structure is so vital."

Duffy talks of the "appalling vista of no proper middle management" in schools, one of the issues the rejected PCW deal was designed to deal with.

He regrets that with the exodus of the nuns from principalships they are often replaced by male rather than female lay teachers. "There have been so many extraordinarily able women principals. Sister Maire Ward who ran the Presentation Convent in a very deprived area of Limerick, is one who comes to mind. Going back further the Dominican Mother Jordana was a most formidable person; it never occurred to her to even think that women were anything other than equal - or superior - to men.

"But only one in 13 applicants for lay principalships is from women; it's very regrettable."

JUST AS WITH the issues of the community schools which so preoccupied people at the time, he wonders how really significant is the current controversy over composition of boards of management.

"In my experience, boards never divide along the line of religious nominees on one side and outsiders on the other. Indeed, it seems to me that the bigger problem for school boards is almost invariably to find enough committed people of high calibre who are prepared to serve. It is more the quality of the people than who they represent that matters in practice."

In many instances, religious orders nominate parents of students or of past pupils as their representatives on boards.

If the 1970s was the decade of building and expansion, the 1980s one of preoccupation with structures and management, what about the 1990s? "Rationalisation to cope with falling birth rate. And curriculum - I am very heartened at the extent to which curriculum reform has dominated secondary education in the past few years."

Minister Niamh Bhreathnach has achieved much on this front, he feels. "It has been traumatic for schools - the avalanche of new programmes and new syllabuses has placed huge demands on teachers and schools." But it is still, he says, a very positive development.

We have been cushioned from the severest effects of falling enrolments in second level by the introduction of the Transition Year, he feels, but he has no doubt that there will be "cut throat competition" between schools before too long. He has no illusion that rationalisation is going to be easy.

Decian Duffy is not sure, he says, that people have fully realised that "rationalisation" means closing schools and merging schools on a large scale. "And I see no way around that."

The biggest problem facing Irish education into the new millennium? "Undoubtedly it is how an ageing teaching profession can deal with an increasingly restless teenage student population.

Falling enrolments will mean less new blood coming into the profession - "it is happening already" - and he foresees a cohort of older teachers struggling with a youth culture increasingly remote from them and increasingly difficult to discipline and teach.

"I feel that schools always need new blood, a supply of younger teachers who are somewhat closer in age to the cultural experiences of the students." That is why early retirement is such a major issue, he says.