TEACHER'S PET:Unusually, Mary Hanafin has been keeping a low-profile in the run-up to the teacher conferences. This will be the fourth time Hanafin has addressed the teachers, but there is a distinct change in mood this year.

Hanafin has already told the three teaching unions at separate meetings that there is no money in the kitty and no goodies to be unveiled this week.

So the big story at this year's conferences? It's going to be how delegates respond to the Minister. In recent years, Hanafin has won great kudos for restoring relations with the teachers after the turbulent Dempsey era. She has been praised for her natural rapport with the profession. She has also been feted and given a warm embrace by delegates at recent conferences.

So, any sign that the love affair between Hanafin and the teacher is over will be bad news for an ambitious minister.

She is acutely aware of the danger; that is why she has worked overtime to ensure that this morning's speech will touch the right buttons. Expect lots of stuff about the dark economic clouds and a row back on all the investment to date. But teachers are in no mood to be grateful for the kind of facilities that other countries take for granted.

Many are agitated and exasperated by the lack of supports and services in schools. For the first time, Mary Hanafin could be entering the lion's den.

• That joint article by Hugh Brady of UCD and John Hegarty of Trinity on the funding crisis has been rightly praised across the sector.

The two men have clashed in the past - most notably during the poaching row two years ago - but all is now sweetness and light.

The robust case presented by the two university presidents should give the Department of Education leverage to extract much more from Finance. But is Marlborough Street much too sheepish in its dealings with the mandarins in Merrion Street?

• What is to be done with the institutes of technology?

In the past year, the 13 ITs established a new body - Institutes of Technology Ireland - and it commissioned various consultants' reports to tell us about their great work.

What happens next? DIT, Cork, Waterfordand some others say they would like to abandon ship in favour of university status.

There appears to be an obsession about the "U-word", even though four of the top 10 colleges in the world, such as MIT and LSE, manage very well without the word "university" in their names

Is it time for the Government to end all of this nonsense by making a clear public statement saying that seven universities in the Republic is quite enough? After all, that was a key finding in the landmark OECD report in the third-level sector here.