The appointment of a facilitator to examine all the issues in the teachers' dispute is a positive development. The two-month campaign by the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI) has seen students lose nine school days this term. More disruption is threatened from mid-January and the ASTI has also threatened a ban on exam work from February. The teachers' campaign has been somewhat overshadowed in the media by the taxi dispute, the Budget and the Clinton visit but for 350,000 students and their families its impact is keenly felt. Teachers, even those who support the strike, say students have been unsettled by the constant disruption to the school timetable.
The appointment of Mr Tom Pomphrett of the Labour Relations Commission provides a glimmer of hope that some compromise can be found. The campaign has been a difficult one for ASTI, even though public opinion would probably accept that teachers have a case for a significant pay increase. The union has left itself vulnerable to the charge that it never framed a coherent strategy. Its decision to walk out of negotiations on the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) has proved disastrous - as some wiser counsels within the ASTI warned six months ago. With the other teaching unions inside the partnership fold, the ASTI has looked weak and isolated. The success of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) and the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) in extracting a range of significant pay and other concessions has increased the pressure.
In recent weeks, the Government was happy to leave the ASTI to sweat it out, safe in the knowledge that the other public service unions would not tolerate any concession to a union which had placed itself outside the partnership. While the ASTI has demanded some negotiating forum for its claim, the INTO and the TUI were content to use the PPF's benchmarking body to pursue their own broadly similar pay demands. It is no longer clear why ASTI will not participate in the benchmarking body, which will reward teachers for both past and future improvements in productivity. The timetable for the body to report has been fast-tracked - and the first down-payment on any pay award will be paid retrospectively from next December. Why is benchmarking good enough for the INTO and the TUI but not good enough for the ASTI? At this juncture, the union should be looking for a way out of the dispute. Opinion poll evidence suggests that public support has begun to melt away. Many within the union recognise that it is losing the public relations battle. An escalation of the dispute in January will only unleash further parent and student protests, and make the ASTI look more desperate. ASTI sources were cautious about the possibility of progress yesterday. They pointed out that Mr Pomphrett will not address the substantial issue of their 30 per cent pay claim but rather how a forum can be established to deal with it. For all that, it should not be beyond the capacity of the ASTI and the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, to work out a compromise. There are real and substantial difficulties, not least among the militants within the ASTI who remain suspicious of anything less than an immediate 30 per cent pay increase. It is to be hoped that the current initiative will help to resolve the dispute for the sake of tens of thousands of students and their families.