Minister for Education Richard Bruton has described Thursday’s planned teachers’ strike as “unnecessary” and says there are already “very substantial gains available” to union members.
Speaking ahead of Tuesday's cabinet meeting, Mr Bruton said department officials were continuing to meet with management bodies to put contingency plans in place ahead of this week's strike action by the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) .
However, he warned that the ASTI had made no indication of plans to withdraw and that industrial action would most likely go ahead.
Members of the ASTI are due to strike on Thursday as part of a dispute with the Government over pay for new entrants. All ASTI members will forfeit a day’s pay while the strike, the first of seven days of action scheduled by the union, takes place.
Boards of management for up to 525 – or two out of three – secondary schools will formally alert thousands of parents from Tuesday that their schools are due to shut on Thursday.There is much greater concern, however, over the fact that many of these schools may not reopen following the mid-term break on Monday, November 7th.
Mr Bruton argued that “huge progress” had already been made through discussions with the ASTI and Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI), citing a pay increase of up to 22 per cent for newly qualified teachers and greater opportunities of promotion and permanency for teachers.
“We believe this industrial dispute is unnecessary because there is very substantial gains available and we want to make a similar agreement with ASTI as we have made with the other unions and continue to work to improve conditions for teachers as we go along,” said Mr Bruton.
He said the Lansdowne Road process had already enabled the department to make progress in the appointment of “2,500 additional teachers into the schools so that we are able to balance the need of meeting real public needs in housing and homelessness and education with meeting the legitimate ambition of seeing pay restoration”.
Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone said she was “deeply concerned” about the planned industrial action and that she would join Government colleagues in calling on the ASTI to come to a resolution through talks within the context of the Lansdowne Road agreement.
‘Chaos’
The leader of the largest public service union has warned that if a solution is not found to the threatened industrial disputes by teachers and gardaí then there will be “chaos”.
Eoin Ronayne, general secretary of the Civil Public and Services Union (CPSU) said that there is growing pressure on the Lansdowne Road agreement and he called for early conclusion of it.
“My members feel rightly that Lansdowne Road is not going far enough. We need to see talk about that phasing. We came out of Haddington Road early, we can do the same with Lansdowne Road - there’s no reason why we can’t.”
“The logical solution is to get all the parties in advance of the public service committee of congress with other trade union bodies. To see how Government is going to deal with a changed environment,” Mr Ronayne said.
“That would be an obvious fix from the point of view of the garda situation. There’s been a long realisation on all sides, that they need to be part of the mechanism by which pay and conditions are discussed and negotiated.
“That’s been a ruling from Europe. The Government has indicated it agrees with this, but it has failed to bring in a very simple piece of legislation to allow that to happen.”
Mr Ronayne said that if a solution is not found in the next two weeks, “we are looking at chaos”.
