Nightmares lay bare the soul. They speak from a subconscious which retains and cherishes fear long after the conscious mind has forgotten its existence or its cause. My most enduring and unfailingly terrifying nightmare is of opening an A-level history examination paper at school and discovering it is all about particle physics. The last exams of my schooldays remain the locus of my very worst nightmares.
Now in all modesty, in somewhat later years, when I was a journalist gallivanting off to wars, I had a curious knack for landing in hotter than healthy hotspots. So I have seen many people die violent deaths in the North, Lebanon, Bosnia. Indeed, once, while I was being held captive in Beirut, one of my captors told me he thought I was an Israeli spy, put a Kalashnikov in my mouth, cocked it, and pressed the trigger. Click. The magazine was empty. The gunman, dear me, how he laughed. I, however, did not. There were many other occasions in other terrible places when I truly thought that death was more probable than survival.
Enduring fear
Yet it is not those events which haunt my dreams, though they never quite leave me. No: the one true terror which stalks through my nights occurs in that recurring dream in which I am sitting down in the exam room and finding myself utterly incapable of answering a single question. I suspect I am not alone in this enduring fear. It is probably a commonplace terror, stalking the undergrowth of the subconscious like a terrible carnivore, through the decades that follow school. For this is the first great hurdle faced by young people at the most difficult times in their lives. It is crisis distilled, when emotional vulnerability and academic endeavour are given their first and their greatest public test. In terms of trauma, the end-of-school exams compare with family bereavement.
To use such examinations, and the crisis they constitute in the lives of virtually every single examinee, as a weapon to achieve your financial end is not merely wrong; it falls into the simple dictionary definition of blackmail: "Extort money by threats, use threats or moral pressure against the weak, the vulnerable." So we are not dealing with metaphors when we use the term blackmail to describe the ASTI threat to the Leaving Certificate examinations. We are dealing with literal truths: "Unless we get our 30 per cent, we will proceed to wreck the lives of numberless young people, whom professionally and morally we have taken into our charge, whom we have now turned into hostages, and who are utterly powerless in this dispute."
Means and end
So of far greater importance than the pay claim, outweighing and dwarfing the cause of the dispute, is the means by which it is being conducted. Thus it barely matters whether teachers want 1 per cent or 100 per cent, or that the impact of the pay claim might be ruinous across the economy; at the core is the moral proportionality of the means being employed visa-vis the end. For there can be no justification in threatening the emotional and mental health of tens of thousands of young people, and knowingly wrecking many lives, economically and professionally, when you have undertaken to do the very opposite.
No one is obliged to remain in teaching, and if teachers wish to find other employment, they may do so, though they might find the 30-week working year rather difficult to obtain elsewhere. But the real moral bankruptcy of the way the ASTI has conducted this dispute is that it hasn't even taken the relatively courageous decision to have a strike. This would involve financial hardship for the teachers, and possibly the loss of pay throughout the coming summer months. Instead of taking that hard route, which at least has the ethical merit of teachers undergoing personal sacrifice to achieve their ends, they have chosen instead to threaten the lives and the happiness of the weak, the blameless, the fragile, the very people they have sworn to protect, and at no cost to themselves.
It is the professional equivalent of doctors or nurses withdrawing their services from intensive care while continuing about their other duties and still claiming their pay. We would hold such medics in the deepest and most enduring contempt for such behaviour, and respect thus lost is not easily or soon regained: how do teachers think they are immune from such enduring contumely, or do they not care? Has a mad cultism taken over the staffroom, so that teachers hear only their own indignant voices quivering over the coffee, their own voluble sense of injustice drowning the din of a rising public anger?
Public pay demands
You have to be deeply stupid or profoundly absentminded not to be aware of the horrors of the 1980s, when public pay demands nearly bankrupted the country, and we coped by borrowing money to meet current expenditure. No one in political life can forget that idiocy and how close to disaster it brought us. For this reason anyway, ASTI cannot be allowed to win, else we are back in the abyss we fought so hard to escape from.
But even if the national partnership were not endangered, even if the ASTI pay claim were safely within acceptable guidelines, the Government would absolutely have to oppose it, if only because of the ASTI's ruthless use of blackmail, cost-free to itself. Yield once to that weapon of terror, and you invite its return, time without number: But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.