There are more dangerous assignments for journalists. Getting the last helicopter out of Saigon cannot have been easy. Running the gauntlet of Dublin taxi-drivers must have been no picnic. You don't quite need shin-guards and flak jackets if you are a reporter covering the ASTI conference but they might help.
The secondary teachers are in an angry, defiant mood. And they have the cursed media in their sights. For the past 48 hours, this reporter and others covering the conference were buttonholed by angry teachers who were, as the saying goes, anxious to get something off their chests.
In the world inhabited by some ASTI members, the media - not the Government, not the other teaching unions - are the people who really messed things up. We should be ashamed of ourselves, said one reveller as he moved across the hotel corridor towards the lift the other night. In a chorus, others joined in to chew over the carcasses of frightened mild-mannered hacks, protected only by their neat notebooks.
Covering the ASTI conference is like being in the dressingroom of the heavyweight contender, just seconds after the bell has sounded - and the title is lost. No one is daring to mention the D word - defeat. But even the hardliners - and there are many in ASTI - are not claiming an unqualified success for the union.
All around the corridors, there are long faces and short fuses. Even the social highlight of the conference - Tuesday night's five-course banquet - did not escape the contagion. The guests, including huddled masses from the press, were treated to splendid musical entertainment from the pupils of Presentation College in Headfort, Galway.
The kids belted out When You're Smiling and Fun, Fun, Fun with great gusto but there was a ghost at the feast; ASTI's troubling pay campaign.
After they sang the old Simon and Garfunkel standard, Bridge Over Troubled Water, the ASTI president, Don McCluskey, told the banquet that there was, indeed, a bridge over troubled water . . . if Mr Woods had stayed here tonight. He held out the musical troupe as an example of all that was right in Irish education and all that was right in the relationship between dedicated teachers and pupils. No one could disagree.
Meanwhile, back at the press table, the bruised and battered hacks were working out the deeper meaning of the song selection. Someone said Somewhere Over the Rainbow was a eulogy to ASTI's 30 per cent. No one said Fun, Fun, Fun was about the mood at the ASTI conference.